Anastasia Pavlou: The Sleeper

Anastasia Pavlou’s painting builds on this finding of an uncertain ideal work and asks how painting can still be practiced today, given what we know of its long history and our awareness of the changes prompted by the second wave of modernism. Her work stands for an approach to painting that is contemporary in both structure and method, that rather than updating the content sets out to reinvent the work. What all this artist’s works have in common, as the discussion that follows will show, is their interest in painting without limits, which since the 1960s has manifested itself in all manner of permutations. This begs the question of the extent to which her works are “specific” rather than “generic,” to borrow de Duve’s terminology again. “The thought one might begin to have,” wrote Stephen Melville, one of the curators of “As Painting: Division and Displacement“, an exhibition that put our understanding of contemporary painting on a new theoretical footing, “is that the internal possibilities of a medium are not fully or adequately thinkable apart from some reflection on the other mediums with which it is in relation.” Pavlou, like many artists before her, wonders whether intermedia works, too, can be premised on painterly questions, and not only that, but whether they would count as paintings at all if they no longer fit the traditional definition of the same. Several preconditions have to be met for this line of inquiry. The term “medium,” for example, has to be reconsidered. Here, Krauss departs from the modernist understanding of the term as the as yet unprocessed technical or material support, which in our case would be the painted surface, and instead emphasizes the “internal plurality of any given medium,” which comprises not just its materiality but also the expressive and methodological scope opened up by that materiality.

Painting’s starting point has always been the flat surface. This self-imposed restriction is part of its identity. Yet it says nothing about how painting explores and exploits the inherent potential of its own flatness. Pavlou sees in the canvas more than just a two-dimensional surface, which like the modernists she might well have made her theme, since for her it is also a two-dimensional support that can be painted as such while at the same time being apprehended as a volume in space. As her exhibition at the Galerie Balice Hertling demonstrates, her paintings can be fast or slow, heavy or light, transparent or opaque. While some were evidently painted by pouring liquid paint of varying degrees of pigmentation onto a canvas lying flat on the floor, others feature small scraps of dried paint stuck onto a monochrome surface. Pavlou’s paintings, which take their cues from Art Informel, are both tightly organized and remarkable for the transparency and expansiveness of their pictorial space. They come across as works that were created spontaneously but developed slowly. Her autonomous, small-format drawings, meanwhile, are a form of figurative, inspired visual thinking. We encounter them again, scaled up, on the canvases that fill her exhibitions. The reflective, hermetic-looking surfaces of her material pictures, by contrast, show the surrounding world of things to which the compositions allude, it being here that the artist incorporates studio waste into her opaque painting. Adrian Schiess’s painting is a good example of this practice.

Pavlou’s photographs, meanwhile, derive from a private context. The people in these images – apart from the photographer herself – are present only at one remove, that is, in the arrangement of the interiors and, of course, in the atmosphere of the place, as conveyed by the interior fall of light captured by the camera. Any exploration of painting these days is bound to entail the question of its touchpoints with other media – in Pavlou’s case above all photography – and the wish to visualize this relationship. One way of doing this is through the exhibition as a medium in its own right. Exhibiting rebounds on Pavlou’s own studio practice and can therefore be regarded as a genuine part of her method. She experiments with the notion of artistic practice and exhibiting as a “continuum” – that being the term used by Adam Szymczyk as artistic director of documenta 14 in 2017 when called upon to explain his decision to break with the unities of time, place and action by staging the international art show in both Kassel and Athens. Some years earlier, the French artist Pierre Huyghe, drawing on Robert Smithson and his “site/non-site dialectic,” had described such an endeavour as the “temporalization of the exhibition.” What it ultimately entails is the practice of constantly recontextualizing what has already been created. For Pavlou, photographing, painting, drawing, reading and writing are parallel activities that may be mutually enriching but not mutually subsuming. Each of her exhibitions is therefore accompanied by a sheet of excerpts from those literary and academic source texts with which she was preoccupied in the run-up to the show. Alone the titles of the works generate an echo chamber of their own that can be understood as a commentary on the exhibition. Pavlou favours a perception of works of art that the British philosopher Richard Wollheim in 1980 described as a “seeing-in” as opposed to the representational seeing, or “seeing-as,” that in contemporary art has since become the norm. “Seeing-in,” unlike the more direct “seeing-as,” “permits unlimited, simultaneous attention to what is seen and to the features of the medium,” writes Wollheim. Since it is not localized, it can focus on what Stefan Neuner calls “the surface of the work – the material aspect of the representation.” It is this material aspect of art to which the artist, in her current works, directs our attention. 

Roman Kurzmeyer