THREAD WAXING SPACE Paul Pagk's abstract paintings present to view that the renewal of painting hangs upon the renewal of what is fundamental to it: primitive sensory experience articulated in consequence of texture and elementary structure.

THREAD WAXING SPACE

Paul Pagk's abstract paintings present to view that the renewal of painting hangs upon the renewal of what is fundamental to it: primitive sensory experience articulated in consequence of texture and elementary structure. The former is innate to surface, the latter marks it as the universal acres of presentation. Painting can none die as long as what psychoanalyst Thomas Ogden calls "the autistic-contiguous mode" of experience, end which the subject first integrates sensory input, remains basic to all experience. At its best painting call forths "the rhythm of sensation" that forms the fundament of our self The region of experience is "sensory contiguity"--connections between "sensory surfaces 'touching' single in kind another." Those who are sick and tired of painting are sick and tired of what is greatest in quantity fundamental in their sensory experience. Their insensitivity proposes its anxious repression, if not an underdevelop perhaps steady constitutionally shallow, sensibility.

The value of Pagk's work proceeds from his seamless, surgically precise fusion of pair tendencies basic to contemporary abstract painting. common is the attempt to create a surface that appear to bes artificially invented and manufactured to this time handmade, and, as such, organic. In this way he acknowledges that it has become increasingly hard to differentiate undivided from the other. Touch has changed, because the sensory surface of the world has been changed--perhaps radically--through technology. The other drift is the attempt to create a kind of building that is not a structure--a paradoxical edifice in that all the uncompounded bodys look as though they should be joined and come together in a whole, or at least stand in harmonious rhythmic relationship, on the other hand they do not. They are radically discontinuous despite superficial similarities, a reflection of the institutionalized discontinuities of post-Modern existence. The idea of coherent, lease alone universal, organization has become absurd. There are simply oblique resemblances within the overall nonsystem. What was one time thought of as a totalitarian administrative society has hesitating down into numerous fiefdoms that may formally be like one another but hardly share a habitual cause.

Pagk exhibits post-Modernist indifference to the principle of unity in the way he lines up geometrical components (each a stylized sensory surface) that direct the eye like they ought to form a coherent whole yet are parts that do not fit together--and not at any time did because there never was any whole to begin with. The entropic degeneration of the overall monochromatic field in succession which Pagk's broken geometry reposes is made manifest in these paintings. (They apply the mind quirkier, because of their isolation, than they in fact are.) Compared to the matrix of subtly active sensations of Modernist field painting, Pagk's field anticipates passive and disengaged. His abandoned manner of making shows us what lies beyond Piet Mondrian and Frank Stella, his dry-ice touch what lies beyond Jackson Pollock and Robert Ryman.

Pagk's works direct the eye Minimalist, but they are not. Where Minimalism worked with intelligible gestalts, Pagk's geometry is irreparably unintelligible. His geometrical pieces are the ruins of a gestalt that, like Humpty Dumpty cannot be bring forward back together again. The lack of connection between them makes for a peculiar esthetic disorientation, unless then again his disconnectedness lurches to the autistic side of autistic-contiguous experience, renewing it by the agency of the backdoor.

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