EVCFE XVI Sculpture

Firstly, there is the technique. The technique in the works of the new project “Body Mass” are listed as collage. If we can overlook Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg with their pop art approach (despite the source material being glossy magazines, Brat makes no references to pop art, to feminism or to Greenpeace), and instead directly examine the sources of applied mastery, then we shall have to reconsider the works of Kurt Schwitters, a German artist who raised composition with garbage to the rank of what is certainly High Art, embodying, through the subtle combining of heterogeneous components, the absurdity of life and a universal weariness. It was Schwitters who invented the term “merz”, itself a collage of the Saxon words “kommerz,” “schmerz”, and “herz” – commerce, pain, heart. And here the difference between the approach of our contemporary Brat and Schwitters, who has long been considered an innovator, becomes clear. The former is entirely unconcerned by the real foundations of the technique – garbage. What’s more, the glossy pages used by the artist for his works are not only rarely collected from friends and garbage dumps – often they’re actually bought direct from newspaper stands, excluding any hint of “arte povera” and the technique’s inherent revulsion for commerce, the multiplication of essences and the excess of products and production in the world. Signs of pain and melancholy in Brat’s refined tondi or in the weighty “sculptures” are also not easily found. Only the “heart” remains. But here too Pavel has his own approach. The heart is a cosmogony, the five elements, earth, water, wood, metal and fire, alchemy in all its beauty, abandoned to the production of just one glossy page of a magazine. It transpires, then, that in its original essence, any printed publication is already something of a higher order. And is the creation of something of a higher order not the ultimate goal of the artist? Secondly, there is the content. To the cosmogony mentioned above we can clearly add icon painting, religion and the history of culture. A magazine page itself reflects the tastes and interests of modern man. The artistic will transforms the content into an abstract paste which, in turn, takes on “body mass” through the absorption of water, creating an artistic material from a cultural product. Then this mass fills up a mold which, instead of supporting the abstract essence of the process, pulls towards the figurative. As the author himself explains, “circles turn into haloes, the mass of magazines bound within them – in the concentration of the Holy Spirit and the mortal flesh that bears it.” It turns out that Brat’s works, without any direct secondary elements in the composition, are expressive and even loquacious. And this is “the real deal.” The ability to see in a combination of given colors an image is a sign of artistic mastery. An ability to enter into a conceptual dialogue with that image is a sign of a modern artist. Although Pavel Brat himself has been educated as a graphic designer. Here we could engage in lengthy and highly dubious discussions of why a designer isn’t an artist, or why, on the contrary, an artist creates design, but that’s not what is important here.

Sculpture:Wood on Steel

Original:One-of-a-kind Artwork

Size:11 W x 17.7 H x 8.9 D in

Delivery Time:Typically 5-7 business days for domestic shipments, 10-14 business days for international shipments.