Eleanor Harwood Gallery is pleased to present Slow Wave, a solo exhibition by Paul Wackers. The exhibit spans two spaces in the Minnesota Street Project building.
Slow Wave is a new series of works continuing and expanding Wackers’ investigations in painting and ceramics. Using his everyday surroundings at home and his studio as source material, his painting can largely be considered still life. However, Wackers also fills his painting with objects from his imagination. He frequently adds gestures that can be read as a moment of harnessed energy, a movement, that in life would be a sensation, but in a painting is manifested as a stroke of paint.
The manner in which Wackers uses objects from his studio and everyday life as sources for his paintings and ceramics can be described as a measure of the human inclination to collect and exhibit objects. Similarly, the varied density and sparseness in his paintings can be interpreted as an amount of time being referenced. The sparse paintings are slow paintings, whereas the dense paintings are akin to labyrinthine puzzles with a lot of information, human experiences, and memories.
Thematically, he references moments, motifs, and patterns encountered during his recent travels in Europe and North Africa. Edges of rugs, patterns that mimic stone walls, foliage and landscapes seen through windows echo recent experiences, a vivid and abstracted travelogue.
The exhibition also includes ceramics that are displayed on painted wooden shelves. His ceramic work is an extension of his continued interest in hand-built objects.
