Strategies Against Time continues Pagin’s inquiry into the shape of historical time and the role that painting performs in rendering the present as such. Through formal experiments that test the transparent properties of charcoal and oil paint, Pagin pushes the limits of pictorial space and recalls the temporal dimension of painting and drawing. Borrowing from the techniques of collage and montage, the resulting works offer an image of the past projected from the point of view of the present: a singular crisis.
In this new body of work by Jacopo Pagin transparency becomes the organizing principle structuring the space of a series of paintings and drawings in which foreground, middle ground, and background give way to a sequence of images that seem to emerge from the ether before diffusing into ghostly chimeras. Their subject matter comes from a merger of automatic drawing with close studies of early 20th-century European glassware design. This combination of disjointed forms has an hallucinatory quality that uses the plasticity of charcoal and oil paint to dissolve the physical ground of the artwork. Like dreams, whose images are tethered to reality by an element of the familiar, Pagin’s constructions have an accusatory tone: their eyes peer out at the viewer; the shadows have sinister smiles. Suffused with a power greater than ours, only Rilke’s conclusion remains to be drawn: “for here there is no place / that does not see you. You must change your life.”
