15 FEB until 12 APR 2025

They conversed in brief elliptical sentences, as if they had been together for ever.
from ‘A Closed Eye’ by Anita Brookner

Across sculptural arrangements and painting, the works in Pages engender an oneiric ambience. Feeling comes before words; words are an after act, an attempt at an associative branching out. The materials used vary and are reminiscent of light-industry and building; steel mesh, plaster, simple art materials; paint, papier mâché and canvas to the more hand-made and particular; dyed fabric, audio cassette and clothing. The perennial materials in some form of constant circulation, sit alongside the petrified objects and moulded forms that have been stopped in their tracks.

Writing about one of the works in the exhibition, a movement of return, Adam Szymczyk says –

One can imagine the air circulating in the room making the pieces of cloth and tape breathe,
move -high up there, almost imperceptibly from the viewer’s position. The title of the piece –
a movement of return – might reinforce this invocation of a movement of breathing, or tide (a
quoted description of an empty muddied riverbank during the ebb appears elsewhere in
Egan’s notes). It might also refer to a movement that is an introspection, a search for a self,
a moment of recognition.*

The paintings are inflected by partial images and shapes generated through dreaming, drawing, note-taking and from lived experience. Not any representation but more of an embodied presentation. They seem as if they are underwater, bleary in a sense. This interplay between lightness and dissolution, solidity and translucency creates atmospheric shifts that feel open-ended, or in a state of flux. This is echoed by the exhibitions’ title Pages, suggesting a continuum, what the writer Lauren Elkin calls ‘an index of infinity’.

The forms and shapes in the exhibition act as traces or shifting responses, tentative articulations of remembered places, interactions between people and everyday moments. What occurs are interior objects where niches and recesses are present, and shapes seem distant. A meandering, sensuous line and sense of fluidity is carried from the sculptures to the paintings, giving form to a sense of openness and mutability.

*(published by Lismore Castle Arts for the exhibition Aleana Egan Second-hand, St Carthage
Hall, Lismore 23rd March-19th May 2024)

15 FEB until 12 APR 2025

Painting generates profit. Color, canvas and other vocabulary in the alphabet of painting coagulate by artistic commitment to a new word–a value–that was not there before. This can be a panel painting or a sign on the wall. The benefit can be a sale to collectors–preferred to museums–but also in exchange, in recognition of the artworks and the experiences made with them.

This is inevitably balanced by sacrifices: of invested time, wasted effort, of control. Both analytically and strategically, Paul Czerlitzki explores the side of loss. In active observation, he remains where painting presents itself as a panopticon of isolated elements, from pigment to painterly gesture, from the elapsing time of administration, production and reception to the spatial influence that the studio or the exhibition can exert on his works. From here, the generation of profit margins is easier, even if the sparse gain is a trace.

Traces are characteristic of all the works presented in this exhibition, in the Untitled series of paint sprayed through open-pored canvases onto canvases underneath. By contrast, the RELAY series takes up excess pigments from earlier works, absorbed by the spray mist, and overlays them with a new color tone. Random sediments become the primer, baroque ornamentation becomes a veiled structure. Czerlitzki has long choreographed his paintings through time according to strict rules, so that each series conceals its predecessors and the history of each work is both factually and concretely beyond its reach.

Each series multiplies the lost. In this respect, the exhibition is to be understood as a conclusion, in that its own economy is not only gradually, but self-confidently and offensively turned against itself, in the sense of a model. Disorder is becoming the principle. Czerlitzki perforates his practice into the exhibition space, from wall to picture to wall. The new Untitled canvases are split, two halves of a standard canvas lie as a filter on another, whose frame can correspond to a wall or a doorway. As soon as you enter the exhibition, an exterior appears: a drywall installation and its supporting aluminium structure.

Despite all the subcutaneous melancholy, Czerlitzki’s idea of painting is less to be understood as “mourning”, which, starting with Marcel Duchamp, was to determine the debates on the relevance of painting throughout the 20th century. It is rooted in the present, whose exhausted imperatives of progress and growth it reflects with a basic idea of progressive loss. Constantly revolving around the possibility of self-dissolution, each work represents a black hole in Czerlitzki’s expansive universe that competes with others.

– Martin Germann