Jürgen Paas – HULAHOOP

Mit der Ausstellung HULAHOOP stellt die Stern-Wywiol Galerie das Werk des Essener Künstlers Jürgen Paas in einer breit angelegten, retrospektiven Schau vor. Von Anfang an arbeitet der Künstler in einer Doppelrolle als Maler und Bildhauer, reiht gemalte Flächen in blockhaften Depot-Konstruktionen hintereinander und verdichtet so malerische Flächen zu rhythmisch strukturierten Raum-Objekten. In seinen neuesten, stark farbigen und scheinbar de-komprimierten Arbeiten fügt Jürgen Paas seinen minimalistisch geprägten Objekten ein stark subjektives, ja rauschhaftes Element hinzu und gibt seinem Werk so eine neue Wendung.

The exhibition HULAHOOP is presented by the Stern-Wywiol Gallery and shows the work of the Essen-based artist Jürgen Paas in an extensive, retrospective exhibition. From the beginning, the artist has worked in a dual role as a painter and sculptor. He lines up painted surfaces in block-like, storehouse constructions one in front of the other, thus turning them into rhythmically structured objects in space. In his latest, highly colorful and seemingly decompressed works, Jürgen Paas adds a highly subjective and even ecstatic element to his characteristically minimalist objects, giving his work a new twist in this way.

A book, a film, a play or an exhibition needs a title. Titles are important and determine the perception of art almost as much as the content. So we also give it a lot of thought and discuss many variations. Have we found the right one? What do you think?

1. suggestion: MINIMAL MAXIMAL

Two adjectives, originating from Latin, mean "little" and "most".
Applied to the art of Jürgen Paas, it becomes a play on words: read minimal in English, it refers to the art movement Minimal Art. Since the 1960s, artists have been using simple, mostly geometric basic figures, often industrially produced and frequently in serial arrangement, and trying to make art out of them that is as objective as possible, full of clarity and logic.

So it fits well with the work of Jürgen Paas. Already in his early years as an artist, shortly after finishing his studies in painting and sculpture, in 1990 he cut his Paris work table into five pieces of equal size and placed them one behind the other in a box-shaped steel construction, in a depot.
Hung next to each other on the wall, the five parts form an expressionist-abstract painting full of poetry and beauty. Cool and mathematically logically divided, lined up into a three-dimensional block, the object then becomes minimalist. At the same time, Jürgen Paas virtually combines the minimalist idea with the maximally opposite idea, expressionism, and transfers the panel painting into the third dimension. In this third dimension, Jürgen Paas is interested in the idea of order: what happens to things when you put them in order? Order seems to be lawful, but it is always arbitrary when you think about it more closely. So what happens to paintings, to works of art in general, when you put them in order? They change, some become more important, others seem to recede, but all together they create something new.

Proposal 2: SIGNS & SOUNDS

Two nouns from English, "signs and sounds".
Jürgen Paas uses basic geometric shapes such as circles, squares and rectangles for his works. These shapes are always monochrome, usually intensely luminous. They could well represent a sign - red circles have a warning effect, keep at a distance, orange ones stimulate, blue ones have a relaxing effect, etc. The basic geometric shapes are also a reference, a sign for Jürgen Paas' artistic ancestors, who include Donald Judd, Imi Knoebel and Kasimir Malevich. The interplay of the individual signs results in sounds, moods, sounds in the installations. KINO, for example, lives from the dynamics of the coloured circles, discs and spirals, from the sound of the colours as well as from the rhythm of their arrangement. The works of Jürgen Paas are so abstract that a paraphrase, an instrument must be used to describe them. Music can be one of them.

Proposal 3: COLOUR³

A noun in a mathematical term.
Jürgen Paas is a sculptor who thinks in terms of painting and a painter who thinks in terms of sculpture. In his choice of materials, the lacquered MDF and steel plates, the acrylic glass panes, he has moved far away from his beginnings as a painter. At the same time, with the colour-saturated high-gloss surfaces, he is as close to pure colour as it is possible to get. Jürgen Paas thinks about how the arrangement of colours among each other affects the perception of the individual colour - something painters have been doing since the dawn of art. Take a look at the COLORBOXES and you will know what I mean. Jürgen Paas arranges the colours in spatial references. He condenses the colour surfaces, arranges and rows them into block-like objects. He conquers the third dimension, the space - colour³.

This is also the case with the archive Colours: since Isaac Newton we have known that white sunlight is the sum of all colours - the spectral colours. If we perceive an object in blue, for example, this object can reflect the blue part of the light particularly well and thus appears blue to us. In the archive Colours, Jürgen Paas irradiates acrylic glass plates with black light. This radiation, which is invisible to us in contrast to other light radiation, stimulates fluorescent substances to glow. The coloured glass plates therefore have different colours depending on the incident light radiation - the laws of optics and painting have seldom been demonstrated more beautifully. Incidentally, the artist is celebrating a premiere with the fluorescent colour archive here in Hamburg. Jürgen Paas had already experimented with black light in his younger years, but then put the subject aside in favour of other explorations and has now taken it up again for the special spatial situation of our gallery. We are very proud of it.

Proposal 4: HULAHOOP

A word of art: "hula" stands for a Hawaiian dance and "hoop" is the English word for (barrel) hoop. The word was invented in 1958 for the marketing campaign of an American toy company that used it to sell a colourful plastic hoop by the millions. The word went from being a brand name to a generic name. It is a tremendously positive word. It sounds good, it looks great and it arouses positive emotions. There is a circular motion in the sound, the typeface and the association of this word. To make a hulahoop circle around your hips, you need coordination, a sense of rhythm and strength. Isn't this also a way to describe the emotional state, the sound of Jürgen Paas' installation of the same name here in the gallery? Isn't that how the whole oeuvre, from its painterly beginnings to the present day, can be described? As controlled intoxication, as reflected ecstasy?

Dr Kathrin Reeckmann, Hamburg, 8.10.2015