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Paul Pagk |
The Baukunst Galerie opens on Wednesday, the 27th of August 2008 from 7 to 9 p.m. with an introduction of the art historian Ulrike Jagla-Blankenburg an extensive solo-exhibition with works of British Paul Pagk from New York. ”Home is where the heart is“ is the first exhibition of the artist in the gallery. Beside a pointed selection of new paintings in oil-tempera on linen from 2006 to 2008 also current drawings in oilpastel, pencil and ink on paper will be shown.
Paul Pagk was born in 1962 in Crawley, Great Britain. In 1969 he moved to Vienna and four years later to France, where he studied Fine Arts at the École Nationale Supèrieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris from 1978 to 1982. In 1988 he changed his resident again and moved to New York City, where he lives and works today. Pagk’s paintings and drawings are part of international collections and museums and were already presented in several exhibitions in Europe and the United States, amongst others at the Fonds régional d’art contemporain Picardie in Amiens, the Le 10neuf Centre Régional d\'Art Contemporain in Montbéliard and the Brooklyn Museum in New York. Besides this he was honored by the Pollock-Krasner Foundation in New York in 1998.
Every painting of Paul Pagk is characterized by one predominant, bright color, which constitutes its ground. The artist composes the oil-tempera of pure pigments and applies them on the canvas in a transparent, filmy or dense way with narrow or broad strokes of the brush but without expressive gesture. Thereby he adds several layers of color with different nuances on top of each other. In a painting process lasting up to three months he builds up a heavy, pastose surface, where he inscribes an open or solid linear construct which is clearly differentiated from the ground in terms of color. These shapes or lines are often highlighted by a third color, which mediates between the figure and the ground.
The contrast of beamless and glossy surfaces, fine and rough parts, piled up paint and deeply carved lines creates juxtapositions full of suspense demanding our active attendance. In some areas the texture absorbs the light, so that it seems to be fully absent. In others light is reflected and unveiled as a shine on the surface. This is the reason why Paul Pagk’s paintings change in the course of time reacting by slight movements of their shades on the light conditions of their environment.
The schematic-geometric of Paul Pagk’s formal vocabulary follows the tradition of Geometric Abstraction and the Bauhaus. The irritating interplay of the lines in “the arising“ (2008) for example reminds of the “Strukturale Konstellationen (Structural Constellations)” of Josef Albers shifting like a picture puzzle between the second- and the third-dimensionality. The self reference of his paintings associates Paul Pagk with the Concrete Art and the Minimalism of a Donald Judd or a Robert Erwin. Pagk’s works point out their own materiality by their heavy and structured application of the oil-tempera. At the same time his specific treatment of the surface is geared to react on the physical changes in the environment of the works. Besides that Pagk accents the painting’s status as an object by the size of the canvas. The spectator is irritated by the fact, that the canvas subtly differs from a square in its length or width and therefore becomes aware about the dimensions of the image. Furthermore Pagk’s lines, which apparently chart the base of the painting and generate visual structures by variation and repetition, could evidently be understood as intellectual-systematic examinations of visual phenomena.
It is Paul Pagk’s characteristic ambiguity, which features his œuvre as an unique and entirely independent position. He opposes the antiseptic abstraction and construction with an intense, sensual presence, which leaves enough space for intuitive decisions. His paintings stand out by the seduction of their almost Baroque surfaces with their bright blaze of color and the deliberately set irregularities. The coexistence of descriptive titles as “a cuboid in a box“ and associatively charged titles as “home is where the heart is“ is also an evidence of his special blend of intuition and rationality. Hence without any previous knowledge about art history we can just take up time to let the paintings sink in and search for a rational-cognitive or intuitive-emotional personal access to their abstract reality. In doing so every reaction is to be considered as an equivalent and none as an absolute, thus it precisely is the intention of Paul Pagk’s paintings to refuse a distinct interpretation.
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