Group show at (harbor) Regina Rex
Opening September 21, 2014
221 Madison Street (between Rutgers and Clinton streets)
New York, 347 460 7739

Material Way at the Shirley Fiterman Art Center at the Borough of Manhattan Community College
September 30 through December 1, 2014
81 Barclay Street (at West Broadway)
New York, 212 220 8020

A cult figure, a painter’s painter, the critic’s favorite, Paul Pagk is an artist whose import is whispered rather than shouted, a secret shared by connoisseurs, his name like a clandestine password amongst an entire younger generation now exploring abstraction. His appeal — for students, graduates, artists, and other initiates — is understandable because Pagk’s work is all about doubt as well as strength, about uncertainty and perhaps even a deliberate clumsiness, the chance of the marvelous in a mistake, the freedom to make a mistake and remake it. A painting by Pagk is almost an exercise in thinking aloud. They allow us to see the artist slowly make up his mind and then shift, like a giant ocean liner changing course, leaving the rich wake of its decision trailing through blue water, the long process of composition left as a physical presence.

Paris has always been a center of gravity for Pagk; as an itinerant Anglo-Czech child he attended the storied École des Beaux-Arts. He was a precocious young student and went on to live the full mythic bohemian life in a squat studio worthy of Louis-Henri Murger. Thus although he has been based in downtown Manhattan for the last 25 years, and is considered a quintessential New York artist, Pagk’s work somehow maintains a European resonance, a sort of Parisian “punctum,” which makes his exhibition of recent work here resoundingly right. His show at the generous Galerie Eric Dupont, in the Marais, is pure Pagk: both absolutely straightforward and oddly unsettling, off-kilter. Pagk’s work can also be seen in group show’s at Two Two One and the Shirley Fiterman Art Center at Borough of Manhattan Community College.

The artist hung the show himself, and has laid out with great care the relationship between the works, all the contrasts and continuities in his oeuvre. Their procession is established with a simple sight line from the entrance right through to the large back room, which contains the biggest paintings. To arrive there one moves through a small antechamber with a few smaller canvases. That room is followed by a long, luminous gallery with a wall of pinned, unframed drawings, some in pink gouache, others of graphite, and others with pure pencil or ink lines. They use many of Pagk’s common devices: geometric painting with a free hand and loose edges, occasionally employing reiteration of compositional elements in horizontal tiers across the picture plane. Many have diagrammatic compositions that resemble circuits or the lines of sports fields. Several of the untitled drawings have anxious hashmarks repeatedly scratched into their surface. They’re set next to a small oil painting, Untitled Yellow (2014), and face a large painting Untitled Yellow, Pink and White (2013). The varied works in these two rooms can be sensed at the same time as the dramatic final chamber with its imposing presence.

The two rows of drawings, challengingly asymmetrical, with eight on the top row and seven on the bottom, and Untitled Yellow, challenge any grand gesture, with their intimacy and hesitancy, their off-hand elegance, thumb marks on the white paper — all these accidents and accents which are perhaps carefully plotted, the secret “plot lines” indeed that run through this whole exhibition from beginning to end. This sequence is in fact infinitely subtly calibrated, like a musical composition, suggesting that all of its cumulative elements are contained in the last large works, even if we can no longer recognize them under the weight of their palimpsest of paint. We can make connections, if we concentrate, between the shapes and contours, the reversible geometry of these works, as they share a clearly connected language, a grammar not of ornament but intent.

The Pagk Paradox remains: work that is both seemingly casual, gestural, spontaneous yet also deeply pondered, solemnly crafted, weighted, freighted with their own history. The last room rewards us with heavily worked, multi-tiered large oil paintings (each 65 by 74 inches). The Meetin’ (2012), Untitled White Yellow and Grey (2013), High Tide (2012-13), and the bright fuchsia Once Above Once Below (2008-14) have delicious, glossy patinas built over months from layer after layer of hand-mixed paint, decision after decision, their white scumbled lines like contrails through the sky.

Pagk is not aiming for consistency but for a more challenging sort of complexity. He balances the sheer smoothness of certain surfaces (as in Once Above Once Below or The Meetin’) against the rough-hewn, clotted and dense presence of other paintings (such as High Tide or many small paintings like OGLS 128, 2011). He asks us to follow his path as if it were continuous, kept moving beyond the picture plane and extended invisibly, structurally, through the whole gallery space, a mesh of infinite, intangible perspective. Perhaps this is part of Pagk’s appeal to a young generation of painters: his work seems at first rooted in a long tradition of old-school abstraction (American AbEx and European movements from Constructivism to Support-Surface) but then reveals itself to be an open system of free-floating signifiers altogether appropriate to the contemporary digital environment. Even the sheer surface of Pagk’s larger paintings have something of the deep sheen, the reflective (in every sense of that word, giving space for reflection) smoothness of those screens before which many of us now spend our lives. But these are handcrafted, infinitely meticulous and altogether human screens porting the presence of all the many stages of their making.

Pagk plays between the “worked” and the provisional, mistake and certainty, the heroic and the throwaway, the build up and the letdown. As a result, his work contains a kind of layered time, a deep map of its own making, as if all the marks ever drawn between the Etch-A-Sketch of 1962 and the latest iPhone app were still extant, eternally present, tangible somewhere at some unfathomably distant, unlocatable level, within the surface of the very screen.

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Figures du corps was a rare insight into the archive of one of the most significant art schools in the world.  The anatomy collection of École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts de Paris is an extraordinary resource and archive which the curator Philippe Comar has brought together in a fascinating and surprising way.  This collection’s origins are in the 17th and 18th century Académie that predates the present école.  This exhibition maps the relationship between body, both human and animal, and art education from the Renaissance until the first half of the Twentieth century.

The presentation was thematic and rigourously chronological.  Each time frame is organised as a table of documents under glass with objects placed upon them.    Documents from the earliest section include drawings by Leonardo and an anatomical reference book by Durer.  Progressively, photographs like those of Charcot  or the glass photographic slides used in Richer’s anatomical classes become more numerous.  The objects reflect a similar diversity from Houdin’s early écorché, to animal skeletons and casts famously used as models by the animal sculptor Antoine-Louis Barye.

The show could be viewed on two levels.  The objects and documents are, in themselves,  absorbing purely as works of art; there were Mascagni’s and Gautier-Dagoty’s extraordinary anatomical colour etchings and a series of studies of a dissected horse by Géricault for example.  However the exhibition really came into focus when the objects were viewed as artefacts, objects of knowledge serving as a series of schema representing successive and distinct academic.  Up until the early 19th century these viewpoints reflect the development from Renaissance humanism to the scientific inquiry of the enlightenment. The academies of science and art shared similar concerns for veracity in representation.  However, as the exhibition moves to the upper gallery, the body as a site of objective knowledge begins to become blurred.  Animal bodies feature more as skeletons, mummified corpses or plaster casts made from freshly deceased examples in the menagerie at the Jardin des Plantes where Bayre dissected and drew from life.  Taxonomies of ethnicity in the form of Dumoutier’s face plaster masks or photographic studies of women from different continents in the journal Humanité Féminine,  reveal clearly that the academic art school system was at the very least a parallel to the dominant ideological concerns of the time.  These are less than innocent artefacts as they are also being used for the establishment of colonial ethnic arborescences and catalogues of exoticism.  Even more surprising parallels happen when the photograph begins to rival and then displace drawing as the dominant form of documentation in the exhibition.  Charcot’s images of hysteria,  famously discussed by Georges Didi-Huberman, and Duchenne’s photographs of his experiments on the effects of electric currents on muscles reveal an increasing preoccupation with medical pathologies.

The ambiguity of this becomes evident in the period after the Great  War.  The anatomy professors Henry Meiger and Paul Richer begin a practice of making studies of what Meiger describes as the ‘representation of deformity and illness’ .  This comes in complete contrast to the pre – First World War practice of studying the morphologies of athletes at sports competitions held during the Paris 1900 Exposition Universelle. Undoubtedly the response to the infirm from professors like Meiger was one of compassion following the post-war trauma that he described as the  ‘lamentable procession of our wounded’.  The period before the Second World War thus offers a chilling proximity of images of the classical ideal of the athlete, in stark contrast to these formal pathologies cataloguing the ‘corps malade’.

By the 1930s the academic system, with its fiction of a classical ideal, was precariously positioned in relationship to fascism.  With the German occupation of Paris and Arno Breker’s exhibition at the Jeu de Paume in 1942 the classical ideal was being put to work in the service of Nazi ideology while their ‘scientists’ had already catalogued the ‘degenerate’ in preparation for the horror of the genocide that was to come.

Like photography, archives produce text, interpretation and ideology. Nowhere more apparent than in the academic art school system, is the correspondence between dominant ideologies  with what many see as the harmless mechanisms of aesthetic systems.  Surprising and palpable throughout this exhibition, is the chilling wind that blows through its taxonomies.  The representation of  Darwinian ‘natural’ selection is so easily derailed in the service of supremacist regimes.  Catalogues of difference and diversity become the unwitting blueprints for totalised and monolithic perspectives.  By the 1920s the conditions for the holocaust can be sensed as an insidious product of its artefacts.

The presence of photography in over half of the chronological breadth of this show is interesting and significant particularly for how art schools can be thought of today.  The anatomical collection is invariably a genealogy of a succession of anatomy professors.  What is interesting is that as the exhibition moves toward the present, there is an awareness of who these people were, what they contributed and how radical their viewpoints could be.  By the mid 19th c century at least, photography was being not only embraced but being harnessed to the production of new forms within the institution of the art school. Mathias Duval’s interest in the movement of the human and animal body led him to develop the first zoetrope, which is the ancestor of cinema, thus bringing the anatomy class into a direct relationship with the history of the moving image.  Under Paul Richer the life model was extensively photographed alongside being drawn, painted and sculpted.  Richer assembled over a thousand glass slides that were projected during his life classes and lectures.  There is a sense in the anatomy class that the photograph was considered to be a graphic medium that was at least a parallel to drawing. At the time, at least this belief was arguably held more by art school institutions than by an informed public.  Interestingly it was via the anatomy class and its professors that mechanical photographic reproduction found its way into the academic system.   This was arguably one of the factors instrumental in challenging its dogmas and canons, releasing drawing from the constraints of artificial rigour and veracity.

What this exhibition reveals is that the academy was never merely a monolithic guardian of a classical system and the stalking horse for salon polemic. The richness of the resources brought together here bear witness to the achievement of  the current anatomy professor at the  Beaux-arts,  Philippe Comar, in curating this show.  It also points up the lack  of scholarship on this subject and the underestimated cultural resource of art school archives.

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