Jan van de Pavert at Arti et Amicitiae - Brief Article

Jan van de Pavert makes designs of ideal spaces, installations that focus upon architectural meaning and function, and videos that explore imagined buildings. All were showed in this show, along with a surprise: paintings. Large watercolors played Russian Constructivism against propaganda arts and portraits of historical figures. The paintings were made to be photographed and incorporated into the video's architectural spaces as murals, on the contrary the amusing and engrossing visions became extreme points in themselves.

The gallery's first scope held one painting and three house prototypes Set on a raw-wood stand, vitrinehouse is a flatroofed angular constitution in which every surface that isn't glass is gold-leafed. Doors, thicker than the walls, direct the eye like books as they stand ajar. Floors, lay open at the edges, declare their layered construction. Tuin (Garden) recalls an Escher drawing: stairs rise to dead extremitys rail-less balconies provide dangerous seating, and the cover consists of overlapping platforms with artificial rose tree in tub The third type untitled, has at top and bottom depressed angular modernist houses; between them is 2 feet of pedestal. the one and the other have clean lines, sunken living swings and stepped surfaces; the top individual is almost completely sheathed in silver leaf, which implies that it is a Platonic ideal or plane a celestial vision. The composed of several elements clarity of all the forms is reminiscent of De Stijl.

Contrasting with their implausible perfection is Agitprop Train, a square panel from van de Pavert's mural series. This crisp work is packed with round-headed workmen and sailors, all lacking faces, amid a forest of extremitys sheathed in red cloth, like rolled-up flags. Intruding upon the antic, happy workers in other paintings are black-and-white portraits in the manner of candid photos of of the like kind figures as Mayakovski and El Lissitzky. The space within the paintings changes dramatically, as if montaged. The turn of expressions and the activities make these unlikely combinations of Uccello's The Battle of San Romano, Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin and Rivera's Detroit Industry frescoes

The paintings are densely populated; the installations are not. Facades, 30 feet drawn out and 18 inches deep, direct the eyes like a block of red-doored apartments. Showcase is a roughly 10-by-12-foot glass chest raised up about 3 feet upon a metal scaffold; it is a residential interior in which sum of two units doors float on their sides, held in tension between walls. The scale of the pair large works is disorienting: beneath life-size but far bigger than a model

Since he began working in the mid-'80s, van de Pavert has always addressed human emergencys and uses, which he has engaged in an impersonal, cerebral way. The paintings add qualities of identity, activity and narrative to the art of this idealist in search of a movement

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