ARTIST PROFILE

Samuel  Paučo

  • Slovakia (b. 1986 in Zvolen)
  • Currently in Brno, Czech Republic.

ARTIST STATEMENT

Feeling primarely like a painter all my work (paintings, objects, instalations) refers to the medium itself... Paint, repaint, cumulate. Each layer or new canvas is like a new "Curtain"... http://samuelpauco.com/texty.html 

Samuel Paučo belongs to the outstanding personalities of the youngest generation of contemporary painters. In his creative opinion, he cannot deny his generational roots, particularly in challenging traditional concepts and practices of painting. It is not a skepticism of it as such – on the contrary, Paučo still remains fundamentally a painter – but rather the need to think beyond its conventional limits and towards its understanding in a more open discourse of painting in the “expanded field”. Although he does not abandon the world of figuration, he develops his work around several central themes and artistic problems, among which an important role is given to color, structure and inspiration in the reality of nature. In this way, one can also grasp the genre of the author’s work, which is keeping alive the essence of the traditional category of landscape painting.

Despite gradual changes in the artistic language, it is clear that the references to particular natural motifs (often in a highly fragmentary or sophisticated form) remain in the context of his paintings continuously. This is also related to his method of work. Rather than the chronological and developmental aspects, the cyclicality is especially an important guideline for his method: his series usually form a coherent unit, in which he plays out his approach to the problem in a creative, almost systematic way. He does not take a single path, but continuously explores more possibilities and discovers a variety of alternative solutions. In any case, Paučo is not satisfied with the obvious mimetic modes of display, but rather seeks a way to reinterpret the subject, not only purely by means of painting but also by the conceptual means, by which he adopts the surrounding world. We could say that his specific style is a delicate balance between tradition and innovation, an unmistakable combination of impulses and experience, drawing on the rich sources of modern painting, and their thematization and authentication through prism of contemporary processes. The author is thus gradually reaching a self-confident style that oscillates between the vitality of an expressive gesture, preserving continuity with classical painting, and his anchoring in the contemporary discourse of conceptual way of thinking. In the hyperbole of a historical lesson, it is possible to speak of a mixture of subject matter residues and procedures of Abstract Expressionism. Elementary kinship might be seen, for example, in the use of gestures, vigorous brush strokes and the associated unrestrained natural painting spontaneity. There is not, however, such a degree of automatism and improvisation as we can find in the artworks of some of the artists of the 40s and 50s. The creative process seems to be still under Paučo’s conceptual control. In spite of the strong inclination to experiment and the remarkable painting energy, the author has at the same time a sense of rational reduction – his method keeps the tension between the element of coincidence or intuition, and the author’s control, its explosive and reductive element. In the context of our artistic environment, we might use as a certain analogy, for example, some of the inventions of structural abstraction, but in somewhat different meaning than connected with the Czech Informalist painting of the 60s. We refer in particular to the phenomenon of abstract color texture, possessing distinctive expressive and emotional qualities.

But let’s try to look at the nature of Paučo’s landscape more closely. At first glance, it is obvious that it is not an idyllic landscape and that its scene is constantly changing. In the beginning (around 2012), its crystalline structures of the majestic ice mountain massifs resemble the terrain of a desolate lunar panorama. Increasingly used there is the contrasting, almost graphic, as if snowy black-grey-white palette with bright traces of color, sometimes combined with a blue water surface, sometimes with a tendency to subdued monochrome conception. Albeit these sceneries refer to the real world, they create de facto a new reality seen through the filter of imagination.

In recent years, the nature of the landscape has changed in Paučo’s paintings. Its special disturbing, or dramatic, potential is revealed in a cycle called Potopa [The Flood] – in the landscape as if hit by a natural disaster. Although completely free from human presence, it is distinctly, however indirectly, marked by traces of human activity. Wooden shelters, huts, sheds, man-made structures are visually applied by their characteristic material structure. Their dominant role in painting also corresponds to the process of painting – on the canvas they emerge in the first layers and without a programmatic interconnection with their background. The author consciously exposes his creative process to the element of coincidence, and the effect of the resulting painting to the vibrating tension between imagination and authorial discipline. As for the denotation associations, these canvasses cannot deny certain inclination to allegory. Wooden objects seem to take on the role of a visual metaphor, referring to the conflict of human civilization with the raw nature. Maybe as a memento of its ultimate supremacy over man?

In the above-mentioned sceneries, we also encounter for the first time qualitatively new image configurations – these are components in the shape of lambda, or letters V or A, eventually their variations. Initially, they may still admit a genetic link to the wooden structures or rather to their remnants in the form of laths and broken structures or structural units. In the background of the painting, the references to specific landscape motifs remain, however the artist increasingly focuses on their denial, alienation or questioning via an almost subversive conceptual intervention. While Modernist painting used letter motifs primarily as elements of playfulness, the author creates more of a riddle. Their attachment to the primordial reality is shown, for example, by the use of drop shadows. Nevertheless, they are gradually disappearing and the elements are going through a metamorphosis into autonomous characters, pictograms, graphemes, disturbing components with their own identity, being foreign in the image with their quasi-realistic existence. No longer in the function of a structural “ornament”, but with an associative function – as a strange invader from another planet.

Although the canvasses implicitly refer mainly to existential meanings, they appear to be also a representation of a spontaneous aesthetic appeal. The distinctive rhythmical structure of graphically sharp painting, in which the author abandoned tonal transitions and modeling, balances on the border of the real and the fantastic, of the seen and the subconscious. The sensory properties of the texture, surface and color, on the other hand, celebrate the visual hedonism of painting. The author often works with small formats as well, that cannot be denied the status of definitive autonomous works, but in some cases, they also serve as a basis for larger compositions.

If we have to analyze more closely the way of Paučo’s work, the method by which he reaches these forms is – it seems – on the one hand, the principle of the formal reduction of a particular starting motif or its visual trace, while on the other hand it is a painting transposition of the optical experience to a distinct degree of abstract (i.e., non-objective) artistic texture, as he is visually demonstrating it through colors, lines, rhythms, and often with their subject associations. His creative strength lies in maintaining a connection with classical painting and the value of expressive painting techniques, and at the same time in his conceptual intervention aiming to deny, alienate or challenge. Many of other important structural principles of his work also correspond to the mode of ambivalence. In this sense, we could talk about preserving the aesthetics of a painting, marked by conceptual thinking, gesture, and process.

Though the author does not tell the story, nor does he illustrate any particular notion, Paučo’s work is filled with an idea and the emotional content which he articulates in different styles. One of the particular examples of such a process might be identified in paintings in which mountain scenery is almost decoratively transposed into a regular, albeit free, handwritten formula. The artist works with mountain silhouettes as with a rhythmized structure that obeys the formal rules of the image area organized into horizontal fields. The uniqueness and unrepeatability of natural elements is thus de facto denied or degraded to a serial ornamental motif.

Recently, he has produced a series of paintings, the common denominator of which is a procedure that could be summarized as a limitation or simplification of artistic means. He achieves such form of image by the abstraction of the motif, or even by reducing the subject of painting into an isolated (as if magnified) detail. It can be either an elementary brush stroke, a pulsating color surface or a simple shape, its fragment even. By this reduction, he achieves an extraordinary monumentality, virtually regardless of the specific image format.

In the context of the phenomenon of the media of painting, which we have mentioned in the introduction, Paučo has recently become more and more enthusiastic about its nature and processes. Generally speaking, he confronts processes specific to the tradition of painting as a heterogeneous discipline defined primarily by material – canvas and paint – with its new identities. One of the specific options or strategies is the shift from the media of a picture towards a spatial object. With Paučo, however, this process is not just a purposeful, formalistic gesture, but a logical continuation of his direction. This is illustrated by an element, which also gave the name of one of his most recent exhibitions Znak [The Symbol] in Artkle Gallery in early 2018. A dominant theme of the exhibition were the already mentioned geometric shapes in the form of lambda, which play a significant role in the flood landscapes. These characters, graphemes, lack any literary or narrative references, but undoubtedly have considerable associative potential. From virtually alienated existence, to the cracks in reality, to the syntax breaking down the illusion of reality. Liberated and fully emancipated from the surface of the image, they begin to live with their active spatial but also pictorial life.

Exploring the artistic space between painting and a three-dimensional object has recently been an important part of the author’s creative experiments. Through the procedures reaching behind the possibilities of the image, he makes a theme out of, for example, material quality of the canvas, structure of painting, properties and function of the image. An important place among them have in particular the objects in which the author plays out the principle of layering of a variety of shapes, as well as a variety of spatial constellations (such as a hanging picture-referencing object, a sculpture-conceived structure fascinated also by concave layering qualities, etc.). Object structures are also claimed by the artworks thematizing the mobile possibilities of a “picture” (its opening, box-like principle, movable altars, etc.). Also in this case, the possibilities of their understanding are ambivalent. In addition to conceptual play with the medium of painting, they seem to evoke, as well, the associations of operational practice common in the context of museum collections.

Paučo’s body of work, despite his youth, has a remarkable dynamic in which he explores the dialectic of painting not only as a specific medium and means of expression, but also as a means of its perception. Its attractiveness for a contemporary viewer is rooted n the fact that the author is not seeking a satisfactory solving (or solution) of visual conflicts, but their opening, confrontation, and the effort to keep their visual energy alive and visible.

Kaliopi Chamonikola






BIOGRAPHY

CURRICULUM VITAE

Dátum a miesto narodenia:1986 Zvolen, Slovenská republika

Vzdelanie:
2005-2011:Fakulta výtvarných umění v Brně
prof. Martin Mainer
2008 - stáž v ateliéry Intermédia Václava Stratila na FaVU

Akademické pôsobenie:
2010-2012 odborný asistent na FaVU Brno
2012-2018 odborný asistent na AVU v Prahe

Ocenenia:
2019 - Nominácia na cenu Maľba 2019 Nadácie VÚB / SK
2018 - Mimoriadna cena za najlepší obraz / Maľba 2018 Nadácie VÚB / SK
2015 - Nominácia na cenu ESSL Award
2011 - Nominácia na cenu NG333
2009 - Nominácia na cenu ESSL Award

ENG
Date and place of birth:1986 Zvolen, Slovak republic

Eduction:
2005-2011:Faculty of Fine Arts in Brno
prof. Martin Mainer
2008 - stay in studio Intermedia of Václav Stratil

Academic work:
2010-2012 asistent at the Faculty of Fine Arts in Brno
2012-2018 asistent at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague

Awards:
2019 - Nomination for the Painting 2019 Award / SK
2018 - Special Award for the Best Painting / Painting 2018 Award / SK
2015 - Nomination for ESSL Award 2015 
2011 - Nomination for NG333 prize 
2009 - Nomination for ESSL Award 2009