Paul Czerlitzki — Roots — Laurent Godin Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: January 9 → February 15, 2014

“At the copy shop, Paul Czerlitzki is making scans from a unit of canvas and then printing it out 1:1, multiple times. He is doing this without knowing exactly what the machines of transfer will produce. You could say he is working in the dark, fumbling with eyes closed and becoming more attuned to touch. I see him there, the painter in my mind, lightening up the situation, making a joke at the absurdity of his act while keeping deeply seriously about the aesthetic problems he is posing. In working with technology, he is seemingly exploring the paradoxical nature of the tactile effects of the real, showing up a possibility for technological innervation and recalling a transparent honesty of the image as attempted mimicry.

Back at the artist’s studio, the variations arising from the repetition of the paper printouts are dealt out into a sequence and placed back onto the source canvas. A strange loop is in play, one of a subtle transformation rather than reoccurrence. The surface of the applied copy undulates as a facsimile of cloth: pigments of colour come in and out of view from the happenstance determined by scan, ink, print ribbon, the binary code of the digital image. […] In parallel, Paul Czerlitzki has been working on a series that involves taking a fragment of canvas substrate and applying it to a canvas support. Paint permeates through the gauze texture, leaving trace of the action on the canvas behind. The hand of the artist is somewhat removed. The touch of material left to its own devices.

[…] At the gallery, the painting is becoming image, an image repeated is becoming painting. Language is knowingly at work. The tapestry of canvas flickers background/foreground, copy/source, predetermined/serendipitous. More than referential of art history or painting matters, things are becoming permeable. Something tactile is present that is less than remembering touch. This permeable state is signalled by the medium. Canvas has become paper. Hierarchies dissipate. Space is de-territorializing. The threshold is sensed. In these times digital, when the endless copy haunts, this is an art practice that is questioning what can still become known about image making by getting between technological systems— rendered digital, made material, material becoming virtual—and remaining at a distance to both."

— Laura Preston