yucolo.com :: MUSAC. Museum of Contemporary Art of Castilla y León

27 September 2008 – 11 January 2009

Paul Pfeiffer

MUSAC, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León, holds Paul Pfeiffer’s first solo show at a Spanish institution. Conceived as a select overview of the artist’s production from the past decade, this exhibition, which also includes recently produced projects, examines some of the fundamental pillars of a body of work that is outstanding in the United States art scene, where it is among the most recognized and influential of its generation.

Paul Pfeiffer belongs to a generation of artists who have explored and experimented with the use of new technologies in a creative process that unfolds in media as diverse as video, installation, sculpture and photography. For his most widely recognized work, the artist digitally alters old film footage or T.V. sports events from which he eventually erases the main characters of the scenes, dissecting the role played by the mass media in the contemporary obsession and cult of celebrity. His installations are often unexpectedly small, and their technical means perfectly designed and conceived as part of the artwork. But what is striking is not only the elimination of the icon/star, but also the mass of spectators and the void upon which we project our anxieties and desires, especially those related to invisibility or the rejection represented by what we cannot attain, what escapes us. Hence, those references also point to the nearly religious spectacle of professional sports.

So Pfeiffer’s work is not limited to some kind of game of hide and-seek. The references and links in this work are sometimes as sophisticated as they are inscrutable. Horror films and Hitchcock’s movies are among Paul Pfeiffer’s main interests, and they serve as references for certain aspects of his creation. In pieces like 24 Landscapes (2000), the extensive beaches of the photographic series work as silent scenes that arouse our curiosity, perhaps because they are mute and empty images. We become archaeologists in search of traces and vestiges, in an effort to find something familiar. The photographs convey nothing about the invisibility or absence of the character, and we will only realize that there is something missing if we are familiar with the famous photographs George Barris took of Marilyn Monroe at the beach. Through digital imaging Pfeiffer meticulously retouched those photographs, displacing the true subject of the image –the star’s iconic body— and turning the background into the main theme, compelling us to concentrate on the dunes, the footprints and the cloud formations that we would otherwise have ignored or overlooked. Similarly, his series Three Studies of Figures at the Base of the Crucifixion (2001) –in the MUSAC collection—and Caryatid (2000) —whose respective departure points are the deletion of the leading players of a basketball game, and the isolation of one of its protagonists, with neither ball nor opponent— simultaneously address and situate us somewhere between suspense and virtually religious veneration, perhaps in order to provoke an experience that is never quite cathartic or completely comprehensible because its meaning, in silence, has already been lost, or we can only find it or recognize it in the frozen image that — as in the series The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (2004) desperately wishes to be, to be something more than a wax figure on the Olympus of obsolescence.

Paul Pfeiffer

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