Seeing Red

Thought everyone would forget about that red card? Patrick Groth remembers – and he’s rendered it in oil. For the New York City-based artist, it’s not the hat-tricks or winning goals that matter. It’s the awkward in-between moments and the “human part of making things work” that he finds most compelling.

In the autumn of 2022, Groth’s eldest son was born. He arrived in September, bringing with him all the joy, stress and boredom of new parenthood. The birth coincided with the US Open, the WNBA Finals and the Presidents Cup in North Carolina, but Groth, 38, from Boston, Massachusetts, wasn’t interested in keeping up with any of that. Instead, he found himself becoming obsessed with the World Cup.

“I was on paternity leave when it was on,” he says. “Taking care of a two-month-old baby is a lot of work, but there’s also a lot of time where you just have to be in your house dealing with stuff. So I got really addicted to watching every game.”

That obsession soon turned into inspiration. Between endless nappy changes and sleepless nights, Groth began painting stills of red and yellow card incidents from the matches playing on his screen. Flat and tightly zoomed in, the works contain a distinct lack of pitch-side fantasy. The perspective feels almost VAR-like, dominated by broad planes of emerald green punctuated by colourful uniforms. Players’ impatient faces are transformed into little more than brown and beige smudges.

Compared with real life, Groth’s scenes feel strangely quiet. Without the roar of the crowd, the piercing whistle or screams of “REFFF!”, you can almost hear the click of a remote hurriedly turning the volume down, or the low hum of a white noise machine shushing a baby to sleep while players mutter to each other on the pitch.

Before turning to football scenes, Groth had focused on paintings of rodeo clowns – comic figures at cowboy shows who entertain crowds between events while also serving the discreetly vital role of distracting bulls when riders are thrown off. When the World Cup began, he continued painting the clowns alongside the football scenes, eventually bringing both together in a show titled Injury Time at Harper’s Gallery last summer.

“I realised that some of those same themes that I was doing in the rodeo clown paintings could be picked up pretty easily in the soccer paintings,” he explains. “Neither of them are about the heroic moments when someone scores a goal [or the cowboy does something impressive]. It’s about the least edifying moments.”

Later this month, Groth will open another show with Harper’s Chelsea on 25 June, focused solely on football and titled The Most Important of the Least Important Things. “The sport has a uniting aspect. It’s a way of emoting collectively as a society in a way that’s absent a lot of the time,” Groth says.

“A lot of people go through things by themselves, but soccer is a way for communities to experience those emotions together.”

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Tiffany Lai: Hi, Patrick. When and how did your interest in rodeos begin?

Patrick Groth: I first started going to rodeos around 2019. My wife is from Oregon, where a lot of that tradition still exists, and we began visiting smaller events with maybe 150 people attending. At the time, I’d been making work about medieval fools, and my interest there was in expectations being turned on their head. When we started going to these rodeos, I realised that carnivalesque medieval atmosphere doesn’t have to belong to something 600 years old – it’s also happening in small-town America.

I also liked that the clowns wear costumes associated with quintessential American heroes [rodeo clowns are often dressed as camp parodies of cowboys], but they’re intrinsically sad and easy to laugh at. It’s like a projected hero status that’s already been undermined.

TL: And when did you turn towards the footballers?

PG: The football players came about because I’d always liked football, but I started watching it more and more around the last World Cup. I had no intention of making paintings from it at all until I realised some of the same themes from the rodeo clown paintings could easily carry over into the football paintings. Since then, they’ve developed in their own interesting direction.

TL: As in themes of spectacle and loud costumes?

PG: Yes, and I’m also never painting the heroic moments, like someone scoring a brilliant goal. It’s always somebody getting taken to task for doing something stupid or time-wasting. It’s about these interstitial moments that aren’t the beautiful or exciting parts of the rodeo or the match. It’s the weirdly human part of making things work.

TL: I like all the bent elbows in the red card paintings. Even without the faces, you get the sense that everyone’s frustrated and waiting around.

PG: In those moments, there are three people who are furious and think this is the most important thing in the world, while everyone else is just thinking, “Let’s get on with it.” From a painting perspective, I find all those strange non-playing moments in football really compelling. Watching Ronaldo fall on his arse or something brings these heroic figures back down to earth. It’s easy to forget they’re human beings.

TL: Do you think you’re drawn to those interstitial moments because you came to the sport slightly later?

PG: Maybe. There’s a strange relationship to the clock that’s very different from American sports, where the clock stops and counts down rather than counting up. I find injury time pretty fascinating. It’s this weird liminal space in the sport where no one’s really playing, but the time still gets tacked on at the end.

TL: What sports did you grow up with?

PG: I grew up with American football and baseball. I played football when I was really young, but I always loved the World Cup. I grew up not far from Foxborough Stadium, where matches were held in 1994, and I remember when Maradona was there, so it was always somewhere in the back of my mind. But growing up, the ability to watch lots of football just wasn’t there. It’s only recently, with streaming, that I’ve really been able to get into it.

TL: What’s the process from watching a match to translating it into a painting?

PG: At first, I only painted scenes from games I’d personally watched. Then I realised that if I wanted enough paintings to fill a show, I’d have to spend my entire life watching football. I have two young kids, so that’s not realistic.

Now I read a lot of match coverage and scan different leagues looking for cards and penalties. Then I’ll watch highlights and take screenshots from my phone. I start with studies and gouache [an opaque, water-based paint] to figure out the colours, and eventually I’ll take it into the studio and make the final painting.

TL: Is it important that the scenes come from real moments?

PG: I’ve never really considered fabricating anything. I still feel a bit like an outsider to football, so there’s probably an unconscious responsibility to portray what’s actually happening in the football world. Occasionally I’ll take liberties – if a team’s kit colour isn’t working compositionally, I might change it.

TL: I suppose inventing moments would also take away the fun of watching football as research.

PG: Exactly. For an American who only got into football a few years ago, my knowledge of obscure Belgian towns is now bizarrely above average.

TL: The paintings are noticeably flat and zoomed in. What’s the intention behind that?

PG: It reflects my own experience of watching the matches. I usually watch them discreetly on my phone while I’m working because they’re always on in the middle of the day here. The paintings aren’t rendered in minute detail because I’m often watching pixelated, buffering streams, but I think that reflects the way a lot of people experience football now.

TL: Are you part of a football-watching group of friends?

PG: Not really. There are definitely football communities here in the US, but I’m very much my own little community of one.

TL: Do you think football naturally lends itself to painting?

PG: Pretty early on, I realised the players on screen – organised by colour and uniform – were composing themselves in ways that felt similar to constructing a painting. Sometimes those formations happen organically, sometimes systematically. At certain moments they’re completely immersed in gameplay; at others they’re arguing with referees, simulating injury or creating drama.

They can seem entirely unaware they’re being watched, or suddenly extremely self-conscious. In a strange way, what I was watching unfold on my phone had a lot in common with the process of making a painting itself.

TL: Your next show is called The Most Important of the Least Important Things. Could you tell us about the title?

PG: It comes from a quote often attributed to various football managers: “Football is the most important of the least important things.”

I think it works both as a consolation for disappointed players and fans, and as a justification for the emotional importance football can have in people’s lives. I like it because I think the same could also be said about painting – or art in general—Tiffany Lai