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LENNIE BENNETTGlowing amid the muted hues of artist William Pachner's work, a decade of paintings with voluptuous color and stylistic innovation may partially reflect the influence of Florida.
TAMPA - Appreciating art shouldn't require biographical information about the artist.
And so it is with William Pachner, the subject of an exhibition at Brad Cooper Gallery. His abstract paintings and drawings range from achingly beautiful to grimly powerful and communicate all they have to within the boundaries of their canvases. Yet many of us do know something about his life, and we inevitably attach poignancy, even sadness, to his work.
So I acknowledge those facts without using them as footnotes.
Pachner, 89, has been blind for almost two decades, unable to paint and unwilling to turn to the more tactile medium of sculpture. The works on view come from a rich period between 1960 and 1970 before his good eye - he was already almost blind in the other after an accident in his youth - failed him, and surgery was unsuccessful. Works after 1982, which Cooper has shown in the past, grow increasingly monochromatic because, until he became completely sightless, he had only shadowy, peripheral vision. He couldn't mix colors and turned to the high contrast of black paint against white.
In this exhibition, colors emote. The earliest works show Pachner's transition from figurative expressionism to a purer abstraction, as well as an emerging passion for color and a more serene sense of composition.
Composition with Seated Figures, 1960, among the earliest works, is a grim lineup of bodies that seem to pause in a march to death. Their flesh tones are mostly whitened to the color of bone. One person has become so emaciated that the rib cage is now a sort of ectoskeleton wrapping around the torso. A few slashes of pale rose and blue mitigate the somber black and white, an ebbing of life in bodies that appear all but bloodless.
Pachner, born in Czechoslovakia, was in New York in 1939 when Hitler's army invaded his homeland. He learned six years later that his entire family had been exterminated by the Nazis. He had a lot to exorcise, and the powerful, visceral work of the post-war years, mostly done in New York when abstract expressionism was the style du jour for promising young artists, was his vehicle.
An invitation to Florida in 1951 to teach at the Florida Gulf Coast Art Center might not have changed his life but seems to have broadened his palette. By the early 1960s, after wintering in Clearwater for almost a decade, he lets the sun shine on beach scenes or refract through windows into seaside interiors. Curvaceous, tanned bodies lounge on seashell-littered sand or on a bed wrapped in blue stripes. The paintings from this series are sensual and suggestive. Even Nature Morte I, Pachner's 1961 version of a 17th century "vanitas" painting, is less mordant.
A trip to Europe in the mid 1960s must have been a haunting experience, but two landscapes, Denmark and Kinsarvik, celebrate the fecundity and variety of the Earth. They are both aerial views, one of fields in Denmark carved with plow-lines or blue ribbons of water, and the fjords, rocky coast and patches of green of Kinsarvik, a town in Norway. Even on the flat plane of the paintings, the topography of the land feels dimensional. They are set on white canvas, like islands, which may be, given Pachner's history, a comment on isolation and autonomy. Never mind about that; they're marvelous cubist distillations on any terms.
Mirror is one of Pachner's masterworks, large in scale and dense with color and form. As with much of Pachner's work, you're not always sure what you're looking at; in this painting especially, the abundance of merged and distorted images verges on sensory overload. It's primarily a study in black and white layered over colors that sometimes emerge from the shardlike slashes. Over those monotones are more colors: green, yellow, red, blue, sometimes painted in heroic strokes, sometimes wisps. A figure dominates the central foreground, clad in jaunty stripes and a red belt; above the neck is a faceless blob of black, sitting in stillness. Everything else seems to swirl around as if the mirror and its reflective quality are metaphors for the still, contemplative point at which we try to make sense of randomness and chaos.
Amaranth,, completed in 1969, is the most recent painting in the show, a benediction of sorts. The blossom itself is really only an outline, its center a dark, sexual mystery with the stamen glowing phallically from its depths. Soft, vibrant washes merge into feminine curves around it, one looking like an enlarged pistil (a flower's female reproductive part). The amaranth's, or amaranthus', name is derived from Latin and Greek, "the flower that never fades," wrote Pliny in the first century A.D. Later, English poet John Milton referred to it in Paradise Lost: "Immortal Amarant, a flower which once in Paradise fast by the Tree of Life began to bloom; but soon, for man's offence, to Heaven removed, where first it grew."
I'm quoting Milton because Milton would probably understand Pachner as well as anyone. He, too, lost his eyesight, and mourned it in a sonnet, asking, "When I consider how my light is spent . . . And that one talent . . . lodged with me useless . . . Does God expect day-labour, light denied?"
Milton wrote despite his blindness, dictating to family members and assistants; Pachner has not had that option. This exhibition isn't about how the artist came to terms with blindness, which gallery owner Brad Cooper, his friend for more than 20 years, says he has done with grace. It's about how he came to terms with life, its bitter harvests, to be sure, and, if this exhibition is any indication, its replete flowerings.
Lennie Bennett can be reached at 727 893-8293 or lennie@sptimes.com
REVIEW
"William Pachner: Selected Work, 1960-1970" is at Brad Cooper Gallery, 1712 E Seventh Ave., in Ybor City, Tampa, through June 26. Gallery hours are 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Wednesday through Saturday and by appointment. 813 248-6098 or www.bradcoopergallery.com