Echolalia Reprised

Alex Paik’s painting, “Fold”, depicts a candy-striped lightning bolt.  This symmetrical formation reminds of early Frank Stella, and carries with it the collateral history of geometric abstraction that this association implies. Paik extends the lightning bolt beyond the rectangle of the picture plane—a zig-zag slice of paper erupting from the top of the rectangle—that he then folds back over the picture’s surface, draping the image in shadow. A self-effacing gesture, “Fold” frustrates its own elocution, and thereby bites the tongue of the formalist tradition that it employs. This stymie comes off as a hesitation, rather than an aggressive act, the gesture reminding of the thick bangs in the eyes of a shy boy.

This is the more “political” approach to Alex’s sing-songy paintings. Along this line of thinking, Paik is playing (fey) painter populist, engaged in a practice of taste warfare against the big guns of non-objective art. This approach has the artist making sculptures of pre-fab stretcher bars covered in painted geometries. It explains the artist’s impetus for employing found fabric as generative index for his color palette, literally folding his painting practice into a decorative modality.  The artist seems to be thumbing his nose at the lineage of “worthy” abstract paintings, those created under the aegis’ of various unifying systems of thought (Theosophy, Marxism, Existentialism, Structuralism, etc.). By acting in opposition to these images—purveyors of the academic scripture of the moment—Paik clears out a free space in which to experiment. By adopting a pastel palette, innocuous subject matter, and the kitsch of craft culture, Alex’s works are free to ferret out their own insights, to surprise in transformations engendered by the alchemy of the ephemeral.

So then Paik is another stripe of pure formalist, right? This persona ploy— amounting to an embodied mockery of taste in the macho painterly tradition—is not necessarily just a means to an end. That Paik is truly in love with his squirming bands of Hello Kitty colors is quite likely. But notice the variations in his palette between paintings. “Rainbow Car Wash” employs a Santa Fe palette, while “Konami and Cubes” is straight out of an Easter egg hunt. This is perhaps the more important point; Paik’s formal choices are all contingent.  In fact, his process is largely reactive, whether the source is the fabric that influenced his color choices in the above-mentioned “Stack”, or a videogame in-joke that has flown in through the window. “Echolalia,” the title of one of the better paintings in the mix, is a fitting description for the artist’s method. The term refers to a speech disorder found in those with autism or Tourette’s Syndrome, where one repeats vocalizations made by another person. In “Echolalia” itself, Paik paints concentric bands of color to trace the outline of the paper construct he has made, replaying and riffing on the object’s shape. “Powerpop” appears to be Paik’s interpretation of a keyboard, its simplified keys plopped down with the regularity of gumdrops on an assembly line. The painting’s departure from clear representation of its source has everything to do with obtuse materials he’s used to construct it. Alex’s painted articulation of the form accentuates the object’s idiosyncrasies, distancing it further from its reference material. It is this pantomiming, and the inherent breakdowns that are part and parcel to this process, that generate insight.

Alex is an abstract painter who operates best when working in mindful opposition to the more grandiose players in the history of non-objective rectangle-filling.  With a limited set of formal elements and an astringent palette, the artist achieves an impressive amount of surprises. In fact, the real pleasure in Alex’s work is that anything might happen. All stimuli are equal candidates for the game of call-and-response that comprises his abstraction, as the bizarre formations of stretcher bars, origami paper, and video game imagery testify. Like Thomas Nozkowski,  Mary Heilmann, or even Paul Klee, Alex Paik arrives at real novelty through a laudable process of experimentation that involves taking real risks. Like the others mentioned, the stakes are real, success and failure equally instructive, and those stumblings toward insight are everything. 

--Brian Zegeer is an artist and writes art reviews for Timeout NY.