These hallowed halls turned hollow dreams… Patrick Tschudi launches ever so lango-rously into this bejewelled series of prints, which quietly and irreverently whisper, “We had a dream…” It is with his sparseness and spaciousness that Tschudi provides our inclusion in the common delusion so recently and rudely shattered.

Patrick Tschudi offers a pallet of sober colours and detailed architecture in picturesque “portraits” of what has come to be his trademark – the unflinching inexpressive blackened circles and oblongs he calls “families”. These sacred families are untainted by recent events, excepting what we as spectators project. These forms, devoid of expression, as hollow as our hopes and as dark as our subconscious, invite us to project and flatten ourselves into this ever so reductive, re-appropriated, globalised, pasturised, and purified americana.

Inspired by picket fence frontiers, Tschudi gives us minimalist Miller-esque “Death of a Salesman” moments with 36° 43' 51" N, 86° 34' 42" W and the more spectacular No place like home, allowing us to envision our own descent. 44° 01' 17" N, 92° 27' 57" W and 32° 11' 47" N, 86° 18' 25" W engender questions of dominion and domaine, while 27° 58' 53" N, 82° 27' 04" W radiates the effervescent two-dimensional joy of male bonding. He takes the mickey out of every family's animated holiday with his beacon accomplished pilgrimage. His portrayal of the manufactured values, debts, and doctrines we have so readily and hungrily consumed is most transparent in growing up, pride, and fastlane.

TS Elliot’s Wasteland rather than South Park burlesque in tone and observation, Tschudi’s work has no room for the comedy of politics, pundits, race nor creed. Instead, Tschudi’s pictograms work subtly, gently chastising the ideals of home and family – their fullness, richness, and worth. These symbolic doubles, with their mirrored domestic moments, celebrate the doubt within all of us, expressed or latent. It is this exchange of projected moments and moods, the artist's and ours, which give these works their power. Tschudi’s elegaic ode to the barren and ingloriously mundane becomes our own Dark Hollow.
 
  
Mark Pasquesi, Creative Commons 2009