Pablo Tomek. Off the beaten track.
I. Three or four things I know about her
Pablo Tomek belongs to a generation of artists that has made contamination the main principle of its work. If we consider the graffiti origins of Tomek and his acolytes, this principle may seem more akin to an inevitable vocation: graffiti writing is, among other things, a form of contamination through which a certain type of symbol – tags – defile urban surfaces and disrupt order with their share of vandalism and indecipherableness. But what happens when graffiti itself becomes the subject of contamination? And, more precisely, contamination through painting? The unique quality of artists such as Tomek resides in his truly pictorial use of spray painting, through his in-depth exploration of the chromatic and textural possibilities of the spraycan, blurring the boundaries between tag and abstraction. This has had the consequence of raising writing to the level of painting, thus enriching the history of painting with a “corrosive” ethos that only writers could bestow on it [1].
Mutual contamination between writing and painting has been a feature of Tomek’s pictorial pieces over the last decade, culminating in his sponge work: a way of surreptitiously infusing the white cube with urban influences, through abstract symbols – Meudon whiting which workers use to cover site windows or locations under renovation – which “are a form of visually occupying a city[2]”, just like a tag.
While the observation and resulting appropriation of this whiting had already allowed Tomek to go off the beaten track once, it also led him to a form of abstract painting which is inherently open to endless contamination. The current exhibition and its title tell the story – in three or even four parts – of this possibility: they show a number of evolutions, or diversions, tested by Tomek over the last six months, each of which appears highly demonstrative of the way in which the artist perceives and celebrates painting, systematically doing and undoing it.
II. The eloquent frame
For Pablo Tomek, going off the beaten track does not mean abandoning the path taken: it is more about roaming hitherto unexplored secondary pathways, never letting the main road out of sight. Of course, this road is painting. And yet painting is never just about the image or the composition rendered by the combination of pigments or a particular tool (a brush, spray or sponge) on a particular surface (a wall, window or canvas). A painting is also the coming together of these pigments and these surfaces, and all the aspects that help make this encounter possible. Among these, the frame plays a crucial and yet unrewarding role. Hidden behind the visible surface of a canvas, the frame gives it shape and places it under tension. However, the frame’s fundamental contribution to the existence of the piece is almost never considered as such: the frame is there, it plays a role, and yet it is not visible – or better, not seen.
This exhibition confronts us with three large shaped canvasses. We immediately notice their polygonal and rectangular shapes and varying lengths, with contours recalling those of a series of buildings, or architectural plans. As we move closer, we observe how each canvas is actually an amalgam of various smaller shaped canvases, like Tetris pieces (hence the title of one of the three, Tetris Plan), each painted with a sponge and identified by dyads of dominant colours – blue/yellow, pink/grey, orange/green, etc. He first departs from the beaten track with the frame: while the frames for these three pieces are not yet completely visible, they nonetheless make a statement through their fun and unusual shapes, their presence and their contribution to the visual and symbolic economy of the three paintings. This is the case for La Traverse 1 and 2, where the artist crosses, with a black line, all of the canvases forming each of the two pieces.
On other shaped canvasses with blurred, spray-painted backgrounds, in much smaller sizes, this time with a single frame, Tomek opted for a fleeting departure – heading off the beaten track for a second time – into abstraction. He achieved this by creating what he calls “the instinctive art of the man on the street” with a sponge. This features daubs with sometimes easily recognisable subjects – a head with a large open mouth (Watching you), a figure smoking a cigarette (Smoking you) – and other less obvious ones, identifiable through the titles – Dog face, The sun, Art and Hand. Occasionally, we see possible references to American painters, such as Philip Guston, or Donald Baechler and Josh Smith, but the underlying principle of this series is the borrowing of “boredom drawings” and scribbled motifs collected from the street by Tomek – a little in the way of the philosopher and ethnographer Georges Henri Luquet with the childish drawings – showing their natural tendency towards abstraction, as though it were the ultimate destiny of any subject and the essential aim of the painting.
III. Frame to frame
Beyond their appearance and subjects, behind the “home-made” frames custom-created by the artist, lies the desire to break down and reconstruct space. This desire ultimately influences each piece both visually and symbolically. Here, it is pertinent to make several analogies between Tomek's current approach and the precepts of the Supports/Surfaces movement which, between 1966 and 1972, promised a “deconstruction of the traditional components of painting and work on the separate parts[3]”. In practical terms, this work consisted of creating dismantled paintings, their components placed on the floor or suspended from the ceiling in order to unveil the constituent parts of the “pictorial fact”. For some members of the movement, the focus on frame/canvas dualism is paramount: “Dezeuze worked on frames without canvasses, I worked on canvasses without frames and Saytour put the image of the frame on the canvas,[4]” says Claude Viallat about his own work and that of his fellow painters Patrick Saytour, who recently passed away, and Daniel Dezeuze.
While there is no clear separation between the frame and canvas on Tomek’s shaped canvases – both share a given space like a unit – we have seen the extent to which the former begins to embrace its role in the same way as the latter and its contribution to the conceptual success of each piece. This role and contribution become increasingly crucial in the Mises en Abymes series, a collection of four paintings put together in fascinating fashion: simultaneously mounted on various frames with different dimensions and held together only by their reciprocal tension, a very large bare canvas is then spray-painted, dismounted and re-mounted a second time, but with the frames in a different position. This dizzying strategy of folds and offset frames is repeated as many times as the artist feels necessary: the result is voluminous paintings with an appearance akin to crumpled sheets or clothing where, far from being hidden, the memory of each transition ultimately becomes the true subject of the piece. The observer will thus be tasked with visually reconstructing this process, and distinguishing the actual shadows, produced by the folds of the canvas, from the apparent shadows, that is, the traces left behind by the paint each time the canvas is re-mounted.
More then the shaped canvasses, the Mises en abymes may recall some of the Supports/Surfaces experiences because the separation of parts on each piece is a fundamental component of the process enacted by Tomek. Though systematically concluded with a reassembly – demonstrating the artist’s desire to keep the piece whole – this process results in paintings that appear to resemble André-Pierre Arnal and Jean-Pierre Pincemin’s folded canvasses or Noël Dolla’s tarlatan work.
This common link between two relatively distant generations of artists must nonetheless factor in the presuppositions of both. Heavily influenced at the time by the writings of Jacques Derrida and Roland Barthes, the members of the movement shared the aesthetic and political desire to overcome the logocentrism in painting and achieve a zero degree of the latter. This was possible provided that they radically abandon any iconic or narrative intention, instead focusing exclusively on the material work resulting in a given image or narrative. The presuppositions of Tomek’s painting are inevitably different. However, we must remember that graffiti, which emerged in the USA when Supports/Surfaces was already in motion on the other side of the Atlantic, also represented, in its own way, a form of overcoming logocentrism by inserting tags, or “empty signifiers” in the words of Jean Baudrillard[5], into urban spaces. But while original tags attacked logocentrism – as the writings and drawings of artists such as Rammellzee[6] seem to show – through the creation of what could be termed “grammacentrism”, based not on words but on letters and their graphic style, artists like Tomek have, in turn, overcome this particular diktat of tagging, by pursuing a zero degree of graffiti.
IV. Monument to painting.
In an exhibition which is also a love letter to painting, especially abstract painting, it may initially seem strange to finish with a series of sculptures. Yet we have become accustomed to these exceptions with Tomek. His shaped canvases have shown that the insertion of figurative motifs is merely a fun and counterintuitive pretext for once again maintaining the dominance of abstraction.
And so, with a little imagination, the series of sculptures in extruded polystyrene, in different sizes and glossy pastel colours, could, together, remind us of the Barbapapa family. The principle remains that of play and paradox: in practical terms, these large sculptures represent, on an exaggerated scale and in a deliberately caricatured way, the sponges used by the artist to paint, allowing his paintings to forever retain all of the tool’s inherent fluidity. Pablo Tomek’s workshop is scattered with paint-soaked sponges which ultimately dry and themselves become little sculptures in the most improbable shapes.
An ardent tribute to the sponge-object – especially its subverted use, as a painting tool – this series follows certain vibrant and ironic monuments to painting: as in the Brushstrokes sculptures created by Roy Lichtenstein from 1980 based on his homonymous series of paintings from the 1960s, or the enormous Paint Torch installed by Claes Oldenburg in 2011 in front of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia, painting here too remains the ultimate subject and the final destination of any trial or experimentation.
[1] This is focus of the Il Morso delle Termiti exhibition hosted by the Palais de Tokyo from 16 June to 10 September 2023, curated by Hugo Vitrani, in which Pablo Tomek is also featured (see https://palaisdetokyo.com/en/exposition/il-morso-delle-termiti/, last viewed on 25/08/2023).
[2] Pablo Tomek interviewed by Hugo Vitrani, see the exhibition brochure for Rue de Paris, Galerie Christophe Gaillard, 1-24.02-2018.
[3] Quoted in J. Lepage, Claude Viallat – Traces, Chambery: Musée d’Art et d’Histoire, 1978, p. 25.
[4] Quoted in B. Ceysson, P. Descamps, Questions/Peinture – Patrick Saytour, Claude Viallat, Daniel Dezeuze. Paris: Somogy Éditions d’Art, 2005, p. 15.
[5] J. Baudrillard, L’Échange symbolique et la mort. Paris: Gallimard, 1976, p. 123.
[6] See Rammellzee, Iconic Treatise Gothic Futurism, 1979.
"Vittorio Parisi is a researcher and curator. He holds a PhD in Aesthetics from Panthéon-Sorbonne University and his research interests lie in urban art, particularly unauthorised artistic practices, such as graffiti. His extensive teaching and research experience in France and abroad includes positions at the Sorbonne Faculty of Arts, Côte d'Azur University, Columbia University in New York and Fudan University in Shanghai. He has authored critical essays and publications for specialised journals and exhibition catalogues and been Head of Studies and Research at Villa Arson in Nice since 2019.
