Art of Alexandra Pacula: Review of my work during Bushwick Open Studios 2010

Article by Mike Steyels

http://bushwickbk.com/2010/06/10/bushwick-open-studios-10-profile-alexandra-pacula/

About the Artist

Alexandra Pacula was born in Poland in 1979 during a time when that country was deeply isolated under a communist regime. It was a simpler time of few channels on TV and fewer possessions. Growing up without many of the distractions taken for granted today, Alexandra found ways to entertain herself with pencil, paper and ink. When she was twelve her mother gave her a wonderful present: her first set of oil paints. Painting on found pieces of wood and thinning the paint with cooking oil, Alexandra began to explore and push the viscous, tactile sensation of the medium.

When Alexandra was fourteen her family moved to New Jersey where she attended high school. And on trips into the city, experienced her first taste of the New York art world. Here she began to form the vision of what her life would become. While still in high school, Alexandra had her first of many exhibitions.
Pacula attended Rutgers University and completed graduate school at Montclair University where she studied traditional oil painting techniques under Julie Heffernan. During that time she learned to combine her expressionistic and textural style with the polish of delicate glazes and many layers of paint. Immediately after graduation, Alexandra packed her materials and moved to New York City to pursue her career and develop her talent.
In New York, Pacula's work became saturated with the atmosphere of the city that never sleeps: the chaotic, the vibrant, the energetic and never static. The combination of the easily disposable snapshots and the monumental heaviness of traditional oil painting reflects the character of the city itself, and is a profound duality in Alexandra’s work.

Pacula’s paintings and drawings have been included in many exhibitions in the US as well as Spain and London. She has won the showdown competition at Saatchi Gallery in London, where her work is currently on view. Her paintings are included in many private and public collections around the world.

About Introverted Blues

1/15/2010

Introverted Blues

The music is ringing in my ears. This city is twisting like a snake on the way to his hiding place. I feel the swaying of the world around me. It’s getting cold. The wind is sweeping through the streets and threatens to grab me in its mouth, and carry me off to another place. I resist and keep moving, hunched under its whistling hypnosis. Even these walls can’t resist its begging. They sway in accordance to its wishes. Oh…how dreadful.

The lights seem to float on top of their winded companion. They seem like sharp razors that will not let me pass. Sharp with their scolding white heat, or is it a freezing icy light? I can’t tell. My face has become numb from the exposure. How it howls in my ears. It seems to whisper: “ Come join us in our game”.

I wish one of these stores would be open so I can escape their beckoning. I’m tired and my head is ready to burst. This place looks so empty. Where is everyone? I see someone approaching in the distance, fighting his way through the forest of wild piranha lights. Is he going to make it?

My mind is drifting; it’s beginning to fall under the spell of this place. I hear murmurs like sharp beats in my head. It’s a melody that I’ve heard before. Thump, thump, my heart is beating in accordance with the music. It’s like Waltz being played by the clinking street signs and cans thrown about in the sidewalk. I feel that it’s calling my name. I have to surrender and allow it to lead me, allow it to take hold of my mind and my body.

How wonderful it is. The flickering lights add another beat, like castanets, leading me on. Why was I so afraid to surrender to this wind? It only helps me let go of my fears and dark thoughts. The white lights look like doves, flying around and lightly brushing against my face. Indeed, they are leading me to a better place deep inside the snake hole, a place where the music continues on playing, or perhaps a place where the music stops.

Article by Richard T. Scott

WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 19, 2007

Sound and Silence

Somewhere in the midnight hum of nerves and flesh, there is a rhythm. Each city, each street, each place has its own subtle beat. At certain moments, perhaps in a drunken but acute stupor, we have all at one time whispered to the sublime in the undercurrent of the night and felt the pulse of the immediate. And it was in such a moment that I met Alexandra Pacula, recent winner of the Saatchi Gallery Showdown.

My wife and I attended an eclectic and vibrant party in east Williamsburg, amidst the rush of the tango and the thrum of voices. My good friend Adam Miller had invited me to his studio for this party in almost the nether realms of the warehouse jungle. It was this night that we requested of his girlfriend, Alexandra, who had a studio in the same building, to allow us to visit her studio.

I was immediately taken by the homage to Nighthawks above, entitled Nocturnal Escapade. In the blur of my own aesthetic intoxication, I was able to sense the pulse of the city as I had never before encountered. Stretching back into the inky darkness of Jack Kerouac's New York, the Subterranean bee-bop of a lost generation, and Hopper himself perched upon the bar stool, I glimpsed the string which connects the ghosts of past - through the fluid hours - to strum a steady note under the fluorescent lights. I realized then, that the hum I heard, in the cold New York night, was not that of the warm bar lights, but a supernatural communion with all those lonely souls who've passed before. The city that never sleeps, has truly not slept for years, and somehow this enables each year to live on, blurring into the next to leave an echo which one might detect in the obscure encryptions of Alexandra's calligraphic brushwork.

Alexandra's work is a sensuous effigy to the night life. But more than that, it seeks a truth which lies beneath the clutter of voices and dirty martini's. It seeks (and finds) that intangible eternity which yawns into the depths of human collective remembrance. She employs the color and brush much like a jazz master, drawing on the greatness of the past, infusing it with her own soulful yearning, and improvising amidst our social and physical realities to create a fluctuating reverberation between the abstract and the corporeal. This excitement speaks of both passion and melancholy, but the tension between the two is what makes it so compelling.