Adrian Dannatt reviews Paul Pagk: Oeuvres Récentes at Galerie Eric Dupont, Paris, on view through October 26, 2014.

Dannat writes: "A painting by Pagk is almost an exercise in thinking aloud. They allow us to see the artist slowly make up his mind and then shift, like a giant ocean liner changing course, leaving the rich wake of its decision trailing through blue water, the long process of composition left as a physical presence… The Pagk Paradox remains: work that is both seemingly casual, gestural, spontaneous yet also deeply pondered, solemnly crafted, weighted, freighted with their own history. … his work seems at first rooted in a long tradition of old-school abstraction (American AbEx and European movements from Constructivism to Support-Surface) but then reveals itself to be an open system of free-floating signifiers altogether appropriate to the contemporary digital environment… But these are handcrafted, infinitely meticulous and altogether human screens porting the presence of all the many stages of their making. Pagk plays between the 'worked' and the provisional, mistake and certainty, the heroic and the throwaway, the build up and the letdown. As a result, his work contains a kind of layered time, a deep map of its own making."