Jon Pestoni’s (b. 1969, St. Helena, California) paintings are proposals, formal experiments in which competing, even contradictory, aesthetic positions co-exist, often within the same work. They are documents of an ongoing process of self-examination, cancellation, and improvisation in which the desired result is not only visual surprise but also the continual rediscovery of how art feels in real time, on a moment-to-moment basis.

ccordingly, Pestoni considers a painting successfully resolved when it undoes what was originally expected of it. The moods conjured from painting to painting therefore vary widely, and sometimes even contradict one another. Pestoni’s work is borne of the notion that the fullest range of emotional and intellectual associations are part of the act of looking, and that self-examination and self-doubt are the crucibles in which chaos is transformed into meaningful experience.

In 2016, Jon Pestoni was the subject of a solo exhibition at the Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio. Among recent group exhibitions are Trace of Existence, Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing (2016); Abstraction (sound and vision), Todd Madigan Gallery, California State University Bakersfield (2013); Alone Together, Rubell Family Collection, Miami (2013); and Real Simple, selections from the collection of Martin and Rebecca Eisenberg, Riverview School, East Sandwich, Massachusetts (2012).

Pestoni’s work is in the permanent collections of the Cleveland Museum of Art; Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris; Rennie Collection, Vancouver; Rubell Family Collection, Miami; Sammlung Goetz, Munich; and Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing, among other institutions. He lives and works in Los Angeles.
JON PESTONI
born 1969, St. Helena, CA?lives and works in Los Angeles, CA

EDUCA TION 1996 MFA, University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA 1992 BA, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA

SELECTED SOLO / TWO PERSON EXHIBITIONS 2016 Real Fine Arts, New York, NY *Some Years, Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH
2015 David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles, CA
2014 Alex Hubbard, Jon Pestoni, Eleni Koroneou Gallery, Athens, Greece Shane Campbell Gallery, Chicago, IL
2013 Real Fine Arts, Brooklyn, NY?Shane Campbell Gallery, Chicago, IL
2012 David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles, CA Drawings, Shane Campbell Gallery, Oak Park, IL
2011 Jon Pestoni, Lisa Cooley, New York, NY?2010 Alex Hubbard, Jon Pestoni, Shane Campbell Gallery, Chicago, IL 2009 Jon Pestoni and Zak Prekop, Lisa Cooley, New York, NY

SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS 2018 ABOVE THE TREELINE: Virginia Overton, Jon Pestoni, Rezi van Lankveld, Ambera Wellman, Office Baroque, Brussels, Belgium Mythologies of a Sublime, Pedro Cera, Lisbon, Portugal

Jon Pestoni is a Los Angeles-based painter known for his expressive abstract canvases, layering a variety of painterly techniques and modes of application, from thick drips and smears to patchy dry-brush strokes, to call attention to the processes and materials of painting itself.

Experimenting with the possibilities inherent in the basic elements of painting–surface, texture, color, and line–Pestoni’s brightly colored, densely worked surfaces register the hand of the artist over time.

He received his MFA from UCLA in 1996 and has exhibited throughout the United States and Europe. His work was also featured in the book “Vitamin P2” published by Phaidon in 2011.