Dear J—
On Saturday, I stopped by the Miguel Abreu Gallery on Eldridge Street to see the Paul Pagk exhibition you made me aware of on VernissageTV. Admittedly, I halfway listened to the video and did little research beyond looking at the paintings online. Still, I was intrigued to seek them out in person because of your question regarding what cannot be seen in the paintings in the video.
I continually ask this question myself and struggle with it as a painter who knows how much photographs and videos miss. It is incredibly frustrating because I know paintings are rarely seen in person as intended. Moreover, to be 'seen', the works must first be looked at (and judged) as digital reproductions, pixels on a screen and not paint on a surface. Curiously, NYFA offers a workshop on how to beat the algorithm that scans through (and discards) applications and get yours 'seen' by a human being —albeit that human is still looking at a digital representation of the work!
I spend a lot of time looking at reproductions and asking myself, what am I not seeing when I am looking? That question spurs me to put down the magazine, and the book, turn off the device and journey to see the artwork myself. And it is always a journey, always has been and always will be.
Journeys are never easy, but that is what art is —at least, for me—: a treacherous journey the work takes us on. It begins with me, the artist, conceiving and then making an object (or something), anything that demands to be physically experienced by countless others. These 'others' (spectators, viewers, consumers, or whatever you wish to call them), as they traverse that tricky pathway, continue making the object an artwork by experiencing it, in person, for themselves. This is why for the past 30+ years, I have journeyed inside the studio, making art, and outside it, seeing the art made by others worldwide, in reproductions and in person.
There is so much more for me to make and see, and as much as I hope to do so, the reality is that I will not make or see most of it. I make what I can and see what I can when I can, hopefully for as long as possible. This mindset has increased for me in the past decade, or perhaps I am only more conscious of it. Is it the result of middle age? Or it could be the disruptions to health or the pandemic when the world changed drastically, almost instantly (even if it slowly and partly changes back), that made me more committed to taking these journeys, not for where they will lead but for the sake of the journey itself. With hindsight, I know these are only part of what drives me onward. In fact, I have been ready to get up and go for a long time. This readiness has led me to where I am today — tired, with aching muscles, knee and hip reflecting not only on my most recent long day journey down to the City to 'see' art but on what I do and why I do it.
Getting to the point, what did I see as I stood before these paintings?
First, reaching them took me a while because I was distracted by the space. Despite its unifying neutral white walls and painted grey concrete floors, the expansive, post-industrial fourth floor of 88 Eldridge Street is not the late modernist cube for which these paintings appear to have been painted. Instead, the exhibition is broken up into four areas offering partial glimpses of each other. A long corridor containing four paintings well spaced-out along it leads from the reception desk, with bookstore shelves across from it, at the Eldridge Street end towards the expansive exhibition space at the back of the building fronting Allen Street. Two smaller galleries are to the left of the corridor; entering the first, I encountered thirteen small framed mixed-media drawing paintings on paper. I had not noticed them much when viewing the show online and was pleasantly surprised to discover them in person. The looseness of the shapes, the precision by which some of the lines were incised into and then appeared to float on top of the paper, and the juxtaposition of the fluid, chalky, and waxy-oily materials bumping into, sitting on, and sitting on top of, scrapped away from, and flowing beneath each other held my attention. These small works look messy and improvised, qualities I did not think I would find in this exhibition, glancing at the larger paintings online. Still, they gave me hope for the more significantly sized oil on linen paintings hanging on the other side of the wall and down the corridor.
Verily, to my eyes, the large paintings were not as cold and slick as they are on the computer screen. Nonetheless, I found them significantly less interesting than the works on paper. Pagk shows less exploration of the qualities of the materials he uses in these canvases; this weakens the juxtaposition of lines and shapes, which appear to be his interest. Oddly, their (almost) square format is also visually less enticing than the irregular, torn edges of the sheets of paper that could be standard rectangles torn from a notebook or block (but they are not). This might be one reason I found the paintings in the corridor or the second side gallery could not hold my attention. I returned to the small works on paper a few times before finally finding myself in the ample gallery at the back containing fifty per cent of the large canvases exhibited. Entering that space, I did not stop and navigate the colorful perimeter. Instead, I walked to windows at the back of the room and gazed down at the Saturday afternoon traffic of cars, shoppers, bicyclists, brunchers, and people burning off the stink of the week in the greenway of bustling Allen Street.
With the large oil paintings, Pagk is putting all his exploratory endevours into a single basket of color and composition and grasping it tightly. The canvases are rigid and dull, and it's time he let go of the basket and see how the eggs fall as he does in the works on paper. Looking at both again, I see what they share of Pagk's pursuits on the picture plane. But beyond materials and format, what else is at work in making one approach visually more interesting than the other?
Mulling over my experience of each, I find that 'what else' is the space in which each exists. Importantly, this is the context in which the viewer is asked to continue making these objects art. Although part of this exhibition hangs in a room similar to the one displaying the small works on paper, they are each contained in their own space —the picture frame. They float alone behind a sheet of glass in a neutral white box, isolated from the neutral, white, non-box-like gallery. I can focus on them individually, which I found challenging with the paintings hanging unframed on the walls of the oddly divided space. Yet, to clarify, placing a frame around the canvases would not have resolved my problems with the paintings.
Further, the gallery's space is not my only problem with these paintings. The second smaller space within the gallery containing four canvases and the two in the corridor shows that even in another less expansive and distracting space, they still would be dull. But of those spaces, I found the paintings occupying the smaller one and along the corridor less dull than those displayed in the vast open space with its wall of windows.
This may sound like an easy out, but had the exhibition ended before the large back gallery, had it just been the thirteen small framed works on paper and six canvases in the corridor and small gallery, it would have been a more exciting show. Sure, that would not have resolved the issue that the large canvases lack the qualities that make the works on paper much more enjoyable. Still, the ratio between interesting and dull would have been better, making the dullness less apparent. And there would have been no windows to draw me away from the work to gaze down onto the travelers of the messier, unrestrained, and exciting Allen Street.
Of course, none of what I just wrote about how I experienced the paintings of Paul Pagk could be determined by just looking at them on a screen; I had to make the journey to them so they could lead me on this written journey with them. But it does raise the question of the experience I described in this letter and the conclusion I came to by writing it add anything to the artwork as art?
Best, R—
31.I.23