It is the hand knowing the limits and edges of our sensory capacities that makes magic possible—sleight of hand, prestidigitation, coin magic, are the building blocks of every illusionist’s trade. Deft movements that are practiced until they surprise consistently, for if they fail even once before an audience, their capacity to awe quickly dissipates. Some of the greatest sleight of hand practitioners will offer to slow a trick down, performing it with deliberation and explaining it in greater levels of detail, yet still the trick will not reveal its mechanics. The whole operation is a testament to the marvelous sensitivity and capability of human touch, as well as the frame rate and limits of our neurology.
***
What does it mean to describe? The word has a double meaning. The first sense: to give an account of a thing which is before us. To tell of details, colors, shapes, sounds, tastes, textures, masses, voids, brilliances, blemishes in such a way that the recipient of the description can reconstruct a thing in their mind. Experiences, objects, people, places can all be described, well or poorly, though a bad description is not necessarily unfruitful, and a good one not necessarily enjoyable. In fact wondrous things have often come from inexact descriptions, such as the creatures drawn (but never in fact seen) in medieval manuscripts, which resemble the joy of mutation occurring in a game of telephone. A description can be boring, but it need not be. It can describe the physical or the immaterial, mundane or fantastical (for weren’t Blake’s illuminated prints, to him, a near journalistic form of description?) and the describer is not obligated to distinguish between the two. Description is to lend another your senses.
***
Our language around art is not so remote from our language about magic. We speak of an artist making “moves,” of using illusion, of the importance of the trade off between the hand and the eye. The sculptures of Matt Paweski, are not illusionistic in their construction, in fact they are made up of only a few basic “moves.” The forms, materials, and attachments are straightforward, and yet they still beguile a viewer. How does one describe this gap between simple reality and complex effect?
***
The hand is the finest measuring tool we know. It can detect aberrations up to 1/400,000th of an inch. The eye however, is more flighty, easily dazzled by color, movement, light, and line.
***
Paweski’s engagement with the great Austrian designer, master of ornament, and energizer of the second phase of the Wiener Werkstätte, Dagobert Peche, enters into the historical dialogue between craftsmanship and mass production, between ornamentation and austerity. This form vs. function conflict would define the production of the modern era, causing the association of reduction with refinement. Paweski’s project is to recover what was lost in the overzealousness of this attitude. His Polished Gourd for instance, alludes to Peche’s 1920 whimsical silver Box in the shape of a pumpkin, a box which truly evades the common understanding of box-ness. In Paweski’s hands, Peche’s sensuousness enters back into the rigidity which often defines machined processes.
A common critique of Peche’s designs was that in all their ornament, they did not adequately suggest their own use. A critic of Peche’s contributions to the 1920 ÖMKI exhibition remarked:
“Peche’s works lack the chief component of all craftsmanship: a simple comprehension of what is required to fulfill a given purpose and how to give it artistic form. And with its soundness, the vital force of something natural.”
Perhaps what this particular critic was responding to was the reappearance of the gap between reality and effect, hand and eye. In other words, an incomprehension of magic.
***
Writing about Peche’s metalwork, Elisabeth Schmuttermeier says “In contrast to Josef Hoffman whose artistic roots were in architecture, Peche could not disguise his bent for drawing.” Paweski’s sculptures take a similar view of drawing—it is the base for further realities, for sculptural forms that while inescapably dimensional, could nonetheless be called graphic. They alternate between an almost cartoon toylikeness (calling to mind the old Looney Tunes gag of a character being run over, only to peel themselves up like newsprinted silly putty off the road), and the most refined, pristine dinnerware, which would not be out of place in Werkstatte patron Fritz Waerndorfer’s service. Paweski’s process of drawing, creating template shapes, and then making working models in cardboard re-enchants the hardness of aluminum through the use of more malleable stand ins.
***
To describe, in its second sense: to mark out, draft, to establish the presence of a thing on a surface or in the air. We “describe a line,” we give it volume, arabesques or rectilinearity, define an inner and outer. It is to show a thing which may have always been there, but was invisible to all but the draw-er. This sense of description may raise more questions than it answers, because, what is a drawing? What distinguishes it from a painting or sculpture? Can a line exceed two dimensions? Even more than the first sense, this one proceeds from its etymological root, the Latin describere, meaning “to write down.” A searching line, an inscription, sgraffito—these are shadowy terms that take us back to the walls of caves, describing in the most immediate and rudimentary way.
***
Each of Paweski’s sculptures feature smooth, impossible, compact surfaces—like organs, faces, or household objects, solid but not dense, prominently featuring their own voids, meant to fit in a given space or be easily hefted by the hand. Or rather, like something that would emerge from your mouth, speech bubbles. They are forms the size of spoken words.
***
In either sense, the best descriptions are not just about a correspondence of facts (the grass is green, the sun hot, the beer bitter), rather they unveil an essence, which is to say, they deal in truth. The pre-Socratic Greek philosophers called this aletheia, which we often blandly translate into English as truth, but which more exactly means “unconcealedness,” or “unclosedness,” the opening up of something that previously held close its secrets. Later, Aristotle would redefine aletheia as “to say of what is that it is, and of what is not that it is not,” a water-tight definition to be sure, which would become the standard definition until Heidegger’s revival of Parmenides’ thought in the 20th century, but lacking a more mystical sense of description; a way to deal with the unseen or the unstable; with moods or with magic. In any case, the more ancient aletheia best encompasses our two senses of description, each which deal prolifically in the gaps between appearance and reality, and objects which refuse to give their true selves up unless they are gently (or forcefully) coaxed to do so.
***
Four steps are immediately apparent:
1) Cuts made on a band saw
2) Parts formed by a manual roller bender
3) Vinyl paint applied with a spray gun
4) Attachments made using rivets
***
“The pebble is not a thing that’s easy to define.” wrote the magicien és lettres françaises Francis Ponge. His 1942 book Le patri pris des chose (which literally translates to “taking the side of things”) features prose poems that seek, like the “On Nature” treatises of the pre-Socratics, to uncover the hidden workings of the world by accounting for the sum total of its elements and beings. Rain, ripe blackberries, cigarettes, snails, mollusks, pebbles, pigeons, dung, potatoes, radios, suitcases, horses, swallows, spiders, and apricots (just to name a few) all participate in a thingsness that is often taken for granted, but elude any conventional mode of description. Ponge’s “The Mollusk”:
The mollusk is a being — almost a — quality. It has no need for a framework but only a rampart, something like paint in a tube.
Here nature forgoes a display of protoplasm in good form. Yet it demonstrates its affection by painstakingly sheltering the thing in a jewel case whose inner face is the more beautiful.
So it is not merely a glob of spit, but a most precious reality. The mollusk is endowed with powerful energy to close itself in. To tell the truth, it is simply a muscle, a hinge, a door latch and its door.
A latch that secreted the door. Two slightly concave doors constitute its entire abode.
First and last abode.
It resides there till after its death.
There’s no way to get it out alive.
Every last cell in a human body clings in the same way, and with the same vigor, to words — reciprocally.
But at times some other creature comes along and violates this sepulchre, when it’s well made, and settles there in place of its late builder.
Take the hermit crab, for instance.
***
Like Ponge, Paweski is a virtuoso describer, but in form rather than word. His titles often hint at possible subjects (bonnets, vessels, bouquets, gourds, cuffs, timepieces, lamps, shelves) but more often they are hybridized; crossbred between animal, vegetable and mineral. There is a working atomism behind them, that out of a limited palette of materials, an abundance of forms can come into existence. Paweski’s forms suggest a kindred fascination with sea creatures, especially those—mollusks, oysters, snails—which refuse to present a coherent inside and outside, that insist upon their own labrynthianess. “A being — almost — a quality,” Ponge’s nearly nonsensical line well describes the complexity of Paweski’s sculptural surfaces; they partake in mollusk logic. At first glance, you believe you could explain them simply, as if to a child, but when you attempt such a description, they evade your geometric vocabulary, your mental catalog of color swatches, your encyclopedic knowledge of fastenings, your comprehensive dictionary of finishes. In the words of the prestidigitator “now you see it, now you don’t.” Paweski’s table setting places these disparate “descriptions” in proximity to each other, spilling them out onto the tabletop, somewhere between the tipped bucket of a child’s collection of curiosities from a day in the tide pools, and the carefully laid out elements of a glimmering Peche tea service tray.
***
Five idioms involving tables:
1) A seat at the table.
2) Come to the table.
3) Lay your cards on the table.
4) Table a motion.
5) Set the table for…
***
The table is the site of discussion, of studying, of work, of unconcealment. It is an agreed upon form and forum for hashing things out. The term “table setting” itself suggests a set pattern, a way of laying down the basic serving elements so that culinary invention can happen on top of them. It is the embodiment of Gustave Flaub ert’s famous quote in his letter to Gertrude Tennant: “Be regular and orderly in your life like a bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in your work.” Counterintuitively, a repetition of base forms is necessary for discovery.
This is why patterns and templates have a long history in architecture and the decorative arts, they are proven and translatable forms which work over and over again, like an idiom, a musical motif, or a magic trick. Any graceful curves or surprising reversals are presaged by flat templates that hang in stacks on shop walls, each waiting in the wings to perform. These patterns, jigs and templates along with saws, files and burnishers are a hidden vocabulary, similar to the cartoons of the Renaissance masters, drawings at full scale with their lines perforated and pounced with pigment onto the final canvas. They are the workaday techniques that produce the enchantment of the final object.
***
It’s just that word, “enchantment,” that best describes Paweski’s table setting, a word that implies the impossibility of being pinned down and a failure of the senses to grasp just what it is that captivates us. In his sculptures’ relationships to each other and to the external world, Paweski “takes the side of things,” he revels in their inability to be completely encompassed by description. The table becomes a metaphor for an array of references, but most importantly, it becomes the place of presentation, where the viewer must make of them what they will. We understand their constituent parts, yet they have been transformed by sleight of hand. Here, spend as much time as you need trying to catch the trick…
— Darling Green
Matt Paweski (b. 1980; Detroit, Michigan) lives and works in Los Angeles. He received an MFA from Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, CA. Paweski is represented by Gordon Robichaux, New York and Herald St, London.
He has presented solo exhibitions at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT (2023); Gordon Robichaux, New York (2021 and two-person with Sanou Oumar, 2018); Herald Street, London (2020, 2017, 2014); Octagon, Milan (2019); Park View / Paul Soto, Los Angeles (2018); Lulu, Mexico City (with Ella Kruglyanskaya, 2018); Ratio 3, San Francisco (2016); and South Willard, Los Angeles (2015, 2013, 2012).
Group exhibitions include White Columns (curated by Mary Manning), New York; La MaMA Galleria (curated by Sam Gordon), New York; Wallspace, New York; Parker Gallery, Los Angeles; South Willard, Los Angeles; Octagon, Milan; Librairie Yvon Lambert, Paris; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; kurimanzutto, Mexico City; and Goldsmiths, London.
His work has been reviewed and featured in numerous publications, including The New Yorker, The New York Times, Apartamento, Mousse, Contemporary Art Review Los Angeles, Contemporary Art Daily, Artforum, Los Angeles Review of Books, Artnet, Dwell Magazine, Art in America, Flash Art, and New York Times T Magazine. In 2020, his first monograph, MP.19, was published by Zolo Press.
