Vibrations: Joanne Kent and Richard Tinkler

Washington, D.C

Pazo Fine Art is pleased to announce Vibrations, an exhibition featuring the works of Joanne Kent and Richard Tinkler. The exhibition will be on view in Washington D.C., at 1932 9th Street NW (enter from 9 ½ Street) from September 13th, 2025, through November 1st, 2025. An opening reception will take place on Saturday, September 13th, from 6 to 8 PM.

Kent and Tinkler are each driven by an intuitive energetic source, allowing a sublime, unrestrained quality to supersede the ritualistic processes that structure their creative practices. Ruminating on the physicality of oil paint itself, the artists concentrate on building evocative tactile surfaces that are thus imbued with effervescent mobility. Eschewing the clean lines and precise edges of traditional geometric abstraction, the artists compel viewers to embrace a visceral, wholly corporeal viewing experience. Since the 1980s, Kent has been committed to a material investigation of oil paint. Featured in this exhibition are some of her earlier experiments with texture and materiality, dating to the late 1990s and early 2000s. Like Kent, Tinkler dissolves strict geometries in order to draw attention to the nature of painting as the creation of both an image and an object. Created in a single sitting, his works exude an alchemic aura, the surfaces intentionally unfocused as though trying and failing to access a dream world with potent clarity. Tinkler achieves this atmospheric effect by swirling layers of wet paint directly on the canvas, resulting in beguiling textures that are as spontaneous as they are detailed. In a similar vein, Kent allows intuition to guide her process. She works on multiple ideas at the same time, building her sculptural paintings layer by layer. Each individual peak is molded by hand, a reflection of her fascination with the particular plasticity afforded by oil paint. The constant tension within her oeuvre between surface maximalism and formal minimalism is well highlighted by the range of work exhibited here. Kent makes subtle reference to natural forms; her unbalanced rectangular compositions echo the body’s soft curvature, while the spiked boxes evoke a sea urchin’s jagged armor. Yet, she firmly rejects narrativization. Conversely, Tinkler welcomes viewers’ varied attempts to make sense of his soft-focus abstractions. Perpetually elusive, figures coalesce with their surroundings, sharpening in and out of focus as one’s perspective shifts. 

Discovery persists in both artists’ work, conveying a vitality that can only emerge from an embrace of imperfection. With forms that resist symmetry and embrace the organic, both artists highlight the impossibility of replication and the raw, material presence of the handmade. Traces of their instinctive, labor-intensive processes remain preserved in the finished works, where their canvases embody both constant, kinetic motion and a serene stillness. Vibrations celebrates this ethos of experimentation, in recognition of the magnetic aesthetic achievements that result when an artist commits to gut instinct and sensorial investigation.