Artist: Jacopo Pagin
Exhibition title: Hidden Place
Venue: Public Gallery, London, UK
Date: February 28 – March 30, 2024
Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Public Gallery, London
Public Gallery is pleased to present Hidden Place, a solo exhibition of new paintings and works on paper by Italian artist Jacopo Pagin, whose hypnotic, dream-like compositions draw his viewers away from the everyday distractions and superficiality of the technological world, and seduce them into a state of psychedelic ease and bacchanalian revelry.
Pagin’s expanding horizons have an almost dizzying kaleidoscopic force, embracing an all-at-once sensory experience. Distinct boundaries between figure and ground collapse in favor of a psychic reduction, challenging our spatial perception of depth and distance. Pagin imagines a wild land of infinite and inexhaustible resources, of endless possibility and unknown freedoms – perhaps a denial of our present-day reality, which is burdened by the responsibilities and limits of our natural world. Hallucinatory and untamed, the works meditate on the contemporary citizen and our relationship to our most primal and natural desires.
In works such as In her eyes their window (2023) white feathery florals crown the center figure’s forehead, whose passionate gaze glimmers with lustful intensity through a dark foliage of Rousseauian temptation and charm. Evening land performance (2023) depicts the shadow of a dragonfly across a warm haze at the center of the composition, its wings resting against a male figure standing in contrapposto. Bright eyes recede into the horizon line, as if slowly closing to the light, suggesting the artist’s curiosity for fleeting desire, precarity and impermanence. In this new body of work, Pagin’s compositions are freed from specific references to contemporary design and architecture; no longer bound to specific cultural contexts, he welcomes the timelessness of infinite possibility.
Jacopo Pagin (b. 1988, Italy) lives and works in Brussels, Belgium. Recent solo exhibitions include Psychic Buildings, Linseed Projects, Shanghai (2023); Strategies Against Time, Pond Society hosted by 39+ Artspace, Singapore; and Fata Morgana, Make Room Gallery, Los Angeles (2022). His work has been featured in recent group exhibitions at K11 Museum, Hong Kong (2023); Pangée, Montreal, Canada (2023); Centre d’art de la Cité Radieuse (MAMO), Marseille (2022); and Simon Lee Gallery, London (2022). Pagin’s work is a part of the public collection of the Zhi Art Museum in Chengdu, China.
