Pim Palsgraaf // 2009 Summer Solo Show Artist

Pim Palsgraaf // 2009 Summer Solo Show Artist

By Devin Powers

3rd Ward’s 2009 Summer Solo Show Artist, Pim Palsgraaf, lives and works in the massive industrial sector of Rotterdam, the largest port city in Europe. “I have a love-hate relationship with the city,” says Palsgraaf. This ambivalence to city life reflects strongly in the images and objects he produces. His work falls into two related categories: his haunting paintings and drawings depicting the derelict industrial interiors of abandoned buildings in Eastern European cities after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and his current sculptural works made out of taxidermied mammals bizarrely bursting with parasitic shanty cities made from demolished architectural models. The subject of both periods of works is an outgrowth of a general interest and repulsion towards the urban environment, its austere ubiquity, its expansion and decay, as well as its effect on the natural world.

Palsgraaf’s dark and murky palette and the loose drippy paint handling on the canvas surface convincingly depict the rust and decay of the abandoned dilapidated interiors on which the paintings are based. The controlled and strong use of perspectival space in the images creates an exciting tension against the expressive gestural paint application. You see the grid represented in the grimy tile of the hallway falling apart. This is the institutional architecture or the fifties and sixties, devoid of decorative flourish and unique expressions of cultural identity of any kind. It is universally generic. Form is shaped purely by efficiency of production and function.

In Palsgraaf’s paintings, we see these architectures and the ideologies that produced them abandoned and in ruins. What happened here? No figures inhabit the space. Is this a kind of post-apocalyptic narrative? Do they show the aftermath of some nuclear or biological war? Is Palsgraaf pointing to the end of modernism or what we thought was the end?

These images could be from anywhere, from any city. But they are not from just anywhere, the modernist architecture is derived from pictures Palsgraaf took while exploring the abandoned buildings in the city of Bucharest more than a decade after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Palsgraaf’s palpable paintings of modern ruin are believable spaces. They do or they could exist. In contrast, his sculptures, called Multiscapes, are wildly fantastic structures, inventive in their juxtaposition of objects and thoroughly absorbing in their minute and rickety detail.

To build a wobbly miniature model city on the back of a dead stuffed animal is a violent collision of seemingly incongruous objects. Palsgraaf is committing an act of desecration on the dead animal and simultaneously demolishing the product of a model maker’s many hours of meticulous tinkering. It creates an exciting, clustered and dynamically unstable space. The stacking of building on building brings to mind the Tower of Babel. The structure is so precarious; at any moment you expect the bestial Atlas to shake its spine and topple the entire civilization it holds on its  shoulders. Clearly, there is a pairing of man and machine against nature. The buildings act as a cancer on the animal and appear to overcome it. Or maybe Palsgraaf is expressing something more radical by pairing the animal with the manmade. Palsgraaf’s Multiscapes are an inventive look into the deep and complicated relationship we share with our surroundings.