Duane Paluska manipulates form and function at June Fitzpatrick
By IAN PAIGE | September 12, 2007
UNTITLED: With acrylic, canvas, linen, and wood, by Duane Paluska, 2007. |
| Duane Paluska paintings + sculpture at June Fitzpatrick Gallery at MECA, in Portland | through September 29 | 207.879.5742 |
Duane Paluska constructs more than he paints and configures more than he creates. His abstractions on canvas and panel are built up according to evolving interior laws of the compositions. He pastes painted linen onto the panel in predominantly right-angled juxtapositions of color fields, mostly muted in a contemplative western palette. Cream, sand, and turquoise shapes meet one another to form concrete relationships alluding to both the peaceful self-evidence of a landscape and the creeping repression of a personal psychology.Most of his pieces echo the rectangular form of the canvas, each block of color and line gently, and only barely, interlocking. They can be seen either as rudimentary jigsaw puzzles or towering shapes able to rest atop one another with no concern for physical laws. In one work, however, a prominent triangular trajectory juts into the center of the composition. The tangents insinuate a joined object, a physical relationship derived more from the woodshop than the paintbrush.
This residue of craftsmanship is complemented by woodworks also present for the show. Paluska’s prowess as a fine furniture maker is, in this case, directed by an absurdist motivation. The artist makes useless furniture in order to liberate his crafts and give them citizenship in the art world. “Bloom” is a mahogany ... side table? Perhaps a plant holder? Regardless of the table’s inconvenient hole where the surface area should be, its uneven legs create a graceful skew that transforms the furniture into sculpture.
“K” is a table and chair elegantly constructed in walnut wood. The table seems to grow out of the gallery, one pair of its legs hidden from view behind the white threshold of the wall. The other pair juts out at an angle making the surface area quite inhospitable for dinner. A leather upholstered chair tucks politely under the table but is only a few inches wide, non-functional even for a child.
These pieces are by no means simple miniatures, nor are they recontextualized objects in the tradition of the readymade. The sheer time and attention involved in crafting the furniture steals away focus from the object itself while the paradox of useless furniture conjures questions involving the current domain of the art object. Is a crafted piece rendered art the moment it becomes function-less? Must it be designed to be so? Are we looking towards technique or concept to find artistic inspiration in this work?
A possible answer may be found in another of Paluska’s untitled panels. Linen is speckled with a grit that forms another layer hovering over gracefully placed color fields. One narrow strip runs down from the top of the canvas and stops just short of realizing its destination. The implied movement and its cessation transforms the entire work from a uniform aesthetic to something more emotional. The logic of the essay, and its measured syntax, is broken by a lapse into dialect and consequently reformulated into poetry.
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