Paul Pagk: Inscriptions in a Shade of Color

You don't need to know anything about abstract painting to feel these. Pagk has been painting seriously for decades. Before that, he was a ballet dancer. The show has the sensation of being whirled around by someone who knows exactly where they're taking you. The color and line do the rest.

The color hits first. It pulls you across the room like a magnet, from painting to painting. Mouthwatering tomato red. Pepto-Bismol pink. Eggplant-y magenta. Citrine. The blue of a fever dream sky.

The paintings are human-sized. Big enough to drink in, small enough to lift off the wall and carry home — arms outstretched. Stand in front of one, and it's like sliding headfirst into a bath of color so bright it vibrates.

If the colors heat you up, the lines cool you down. Thin and architecturally precise, they turn these fields of color into puzzle-like forms that move your eye around the canvas. A house outline unfolds, origami-like, into geometric patterns. Stairs lead nowhere in circuit-board loops. Shapes interlock like triangular, butterfly-wing paperclips.

Every painting is its own conversation to join — one is even called Tête-à-Tête. Pagk's feat is keeping you right here, right now. You're in motion, shifting, adjusting, and responding to each, but always held, never in danger of losing the rhythm.

NOTE: Don't skip past the works on paper. The paintings are painstakingly crafted; the drawings are a rush of experimentation. They’re the work before the work.

Paul Pagk (b. Crawley, England, 1962) lives and works in New York City. He trained as a ballet dancer before he decided to become a painter. He enrolled at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, studying figurative painting. Along the way, he turned to abstraction and shed his given name, Paul Alexander Godfrey Klein, and renamed himself Pagk: four letters for the four corners of a canvas. He’s been part of New York’s painting scene since 1988.