a version of this was published in the PDI on November 23 2010.

The noise was crazy at the opening of Jay Pacena’s recent exhibit Static Reverb. Cramped as we were in the small space of Blanc Gallery, the energy was deafening in its youthfulness, the excitement really quite overwhelming. This came in contradiction with the fact that Pacena’s canvasses were filled with the quietest colors of sad blues, grays and whites; his short film that was on loop on the flat screen TV was in black and white.

But maybe this moment in contradiction was the whole point as it forces one to embrace the cognitive dissonance that Pacena’s work requires. An act of going beyond the canvas and living with the contradictions of its quiet violence.

Using acrylic and digital archival ink, notions of what connects us and the spaces they traverse are represented here by geometric lines and shapes in various angles, interwoven with lines that link differently-sized balls. This stereotypical notion of the things that bind us – as shapes that we have in common, as the things that we hold in our hands and make us concrete – is rendered differently by the naked faces and bodies it doesn’t only co-exist with on canvas, but actually lives off of. At the same time that it allows it to die. To change. To be redefined.

The huge canvas of “The Banquet 1 and 2” is a stark representation of this dynamic, with digital images of men and women in various poses of movement. Here, the geometric shapes become weapon (held to the temple, to the nape, to the neck) with which to kill self and other, it is the blindfold that keeps sight at bay, it ties us down, encompasses our bodies and minds, the things we hide within. (more…)