Pablo Smidt - Sugar Rush

Pablo Smidt’s works explore the ways in which art and paper interact, and the ways in which paper becomes art. The familiarity of the phrase ‘works on paper’ from the history of visual art, like the medium itself, can conceal as much as it expresses. For more than a century, as artists such as Hannah Hoch, Kurt Schwitters, Jacques Villeglé and others demonstrate, paper itself can be equally important as a medium for art as it can be a site on which art is realised. Smidt’s works build on a lineage that moves through collage, conceptualism, and anti-art – with detours through the exuberant creative geographies of childhood – in order to produce an art that is conceptually rich and shot through with powerful emotion. For the exhibition of the ALFAJOR suite, Smidt presents a series of wall mounted paper works that explore the most deceptively familiar of artistic materials.

Paper is polymorphous. There is no single kind of paper, no single form, no single colour. Such a denial of finality is an undercurrent that informs Smidt’s works. His pieces are geometric, while that the same time denying reductive formulae for producing ‘abstractions’. The heavily worked surfaces of the ALFAJOR works expand the kinetic exchange that defines conceptual art’s operational geographies. Smidt’s paper appears in many forms. The surfaces are worked, and worked over, but they are not merely crumpled. They are not final expressions of instances of creative frustration. Instead they can be understood to address a more existential form of frustration, the eternal challenge facing artists: that of making interior worlds legible to others while keeping the crucial integrity of the individual vision intact. In choosing paper as a material, Smidt explores the ways in which paper can hold history. Paper is a kind of archive; rather like its common parent material wood, paper bears its histories in a way that other media, such as metal or glass which can be melted down and fully reconstituted, do not. The folds, the angles, the tributaries of lines Smidt inscribes in his works are not drawn in the conventional sense. Instead they draw on emotional wells, and, in their archival qualities tell the stories of artist and the history of his medium.