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?

1st suggestion: MINIMAL MAXIMAL

Two adjectives from the Latin meaning "little" and "most".
When applied to Jürgen Paas' art, it becomes a play on words: Minimal English refers to the art movement Minimal Art. Since the 1960s, artists have used simple, mostly geometric basic figures, often industrially produced and frequently in a serial arrangement, in an attempt to create art that is as objective as possible, full of clarity and logic.

This fits well with the work of Jürgen Paas. Even in his early years as an artist, shortly after completing his studies in painting and sculpture, he cut his Parisian work table into five equal parts in 1990 and placed them one behind the other in a box-shaped steel construction, in a depot.
Hung side by side on the wall, the five pieces form an expressionist-abstract painting full of poetry and beauty. Divided in a cool and mathematically logical way, lined up to form a three-dimensional block, the object then becomes minimalist. At the same time, Jürgen Paas combines the minimalist idea with the maximum 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 organise them? Order seems lawful, but is always arbitrary if you think about it more closely. So what happens to paintings, to works of art in general, when you organise them? They change, some become more important, others seem to recede, but all together they create something new.

2nd proposal: SIGNS & SOUNDS

Two nouns from the 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 bright. They could well represent a sign - red circles have a warning effect, keep you 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, including Donald Judd, Imi Knoebel and Kasimir Malevich. The interplay of the individual signs in the installations gives rise to sounds, moods and atmospheres. KINO, for example, lives from the dynamics of the coloured circles, discs and spirals, from the sound of the colours and the rhythm of their arrangement. Jürgen Paas' works are so abstract that a paraphrase, a set of instruments, must be used to describe them. Music can be one of them.

3rd suggestion: FARBE³

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 panels, the acrylic glass panes, he has moved far away from his beginnings as a painter. At the same time, he is as close to pure colour as he can get with his colour-saturated, high-gloss surfaces. Jürgen Paas reflects on how the arrangement of colours affects the perception of individual colours - 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 relationships. He condenses the colour surfaces, arranges and arranges them into block-like objects. He conquers the third dimension, the space - colour³.

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 therefore appears blue to us. In the Archive Colours, Jürgen Paas irradiates acrylic glass panels with black light. This radiation, which is invisible to us in contrast to other light radiation, causes fluorescent materials to glow. The coloured glass plates therefore have different colours depending on the incident light radiation - the laws of optics and painting have rarely 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 this.

4th proposal: HULAHOOP

An artificial word: "Hula" stands for a Hawaiian dance and "hoop" is the English word for (barrel) tyre. The word was invented in 1958 for the marketing campaign of an American toy company, which used it to sell a colourful plastic hoop by the millions. The word went from being a brand name to a generic term. It is an incredibly positive word. It sounds good, it looks great and it evokes positive emotions. There is a circular movement in the sound, the typeface and the association of this word. It takes coordination, a sense of rhythm and strength to spin a hula hoop around your hips. Is this not also a way to describe the emotional state, the sound of Jürgen Paas' installation of the same name here in the gallery? Is this not the way to describe his entire oeuvre, from his beginnings as a painter to the present day? As controlled intoxication, as reflected ecstasy?

Dr Kathrin Reeckmann, Hamburg, 8.10.2015