Paul Pagk at Thread Waxing Space - painting exhibition; New York, New York

This exhibition contained a not many of what seem to be breakthrough paintings, works in which the artist, through dint of excruciatingly patient labor, has achieved things in his work he cannot have awaited Such breakthroughs are difficult for any artist and especially for single like Paul Pagk, who practices a narrowly defined, historically weighted highly exacting kind of art. Pagk's abstract paintings, with their constant format of two-color figure/ground geometry protect to focus artist and viewer upon small variations, making the advent of any fresh motif, however minor, seem of great importance. Change thus attends to be incremental. Pagk is single of those artists who makes progres through banging his head against the wall for as drawn out as it takes to dislodge a small in number bricks, the kind of artist Picasso probably had in mind when he made his dismissive comment: "I don't search, I find." on the contrary sometimes those who search also find.

above the last two years Pagk's forms have the pair shrunk and expanded. The one time blocky alphabetlike forms have thinned to the point of becoming slim lines, while the surface of land once nearly equal in surface space to the figures, has grown to hold most of the canvas. The lines present the appearance to be measuring off and bracketing the turf as if surveying it for more [i]or[/i] less mystical construction project. These lines, particularly when they extreme point at top or bottom with truncated 45-degree angles or half-circles, also prompt musical notation, so that they are "compositions" in sum of two units senses of the word.

In several of the greatest in quantity recent paintings these slimmed-down lines have vanished completely washed above by the endless striations of the sod color. Perhaps the best painting in the present to view an untitled 72-by-100-inch work upon linen, presents a subtly modulated pink loam whose too-sweet beauty suggests a certain number of pollution-enhanced sunset over Los Angeles. factually, the painting unexpectedly echoe the background evenings of Ed Ruscha.) Here the characteristic forms - an stretch outed L on the left, a kind of half-note upon the right - are still not away just. They persist as spiritual supports of Pagk's new discovery, a seductively rippling paint surface whose arch modulations - achieved with countles broad sweeps of the brush - vary like the tooth of a cloth.

In an unexpect touch of humor, another of the newer paintings had a sphere hovering in its center like something that had drifted without of a Walter Murch painting. This again showed Pagk's perhaps newly acquired willingness to surprise himself.

Paul Pagk speaks, rightfully, of the retiring disposition of his work, but he also speaks about by what mode his paintings are "slow" and reveal themselves alone with long or repeated viewing. There appears an obvious contradiction here. To solicit large amounts of a viewer's time is hardly an act of unobtrusiveness Yet it is a mark of Pagk's ability that his work is capable of overcoming like contradictions, that his lessons in untainted geometry are also occasions for unblemished pleasure.

COPYRIGHT 1993 Brant Publications, Inc.

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