LOS ANGELES, CA.- David Kordansky Gallery announced its first exhibition of new paintings by Jon Pestoni. The exhibition opens on November 17, 2012 and continues through January 12, 2013.

Pestoni's work is an investigation of painting's ongoing ability to accommodate the widest possible variety of ideas on emotional, psychological, and philosophical levels. His practice is predicated on the experience of abstract painting's basic elements: color, gesture, scale, and surface.

Each work is comprised of a number of procedural 'moves', many of which are designed to partially cancel or obscure prior attempts to arrive at a harmonious composition. The paintings' dry-brushed surfaces contain what would otherwise function as disparate information, allowing for each to be read as a single image even though they include broad swaths, active brushwork, and drips and splatters.

The new paintings, which include the artist's largest canvases to date, further complicate the relationship between hand and mark. They also provide a forum for greater diversity of visual elements. Among the latter are forms that retain vestiges of figurative modeling, and incorporate line and volume. While these forms are reminiscent of imagery that appeared in earlier works, here they have been integrated among layers of color with varying degrees of transparency, resulting in dramatic spatial and aesthetic contrast.

The inclusion of these new elements ramps up the potential for contradiction within the space of a given painting. Pestoni's practice can be seen as a constant movement towards the unknown, and a pursuit of heterogeneous visual experiences that expand the notion of what constitutes a finished work. As a result, the metaphorical reach of painting extends beyond the studio, as it intersects with experimental practices throughout the arts and other cultural fields.

Jon Pestoni's paintings have previously been seen in exhibitions in the United States and Europe, including shows at Nieuw Dakota, Amsterdam; White Flag Projects, St. Louis; and Greene Naftali Gallery, New York. He was also featured in Vitamin P2, published by Phaidon in 2011. Pestoni lives and works in Los Angeles.