Axel Pahlavi – Requiem April 4, 2007

AXEL PAHLAVI – REQUIEM

LUXE Gallery,
24 W. 57th Street # 505
New York, NY 10019
April. 04th – May 05th, 2007

Opening Reception: Wednesday April 04th, 2007. 6-8pm.

In this instance, “Requiem” is not a predictable ironic reference to a body of work signifying the containment of some vanishing bit of ideological nostalgia for the practice of painting, vestiges of an art historical woe due to inevitability. Pahlavi, in earnest, presents a dedication to the loss of his brother. These works splay open and cry out as the artist attempts to endure his own story. The artist’s mechanism, his tools and his daily existence becoming an unavoidable trajectory in itself, regardless, in spite of and apathetic to clever rhetoric and art history.

“Requiem” consists of an allegorically visaged trilogy steeped in personal myth; confronting us is a black hooded teenage god, a cyclonic vision of heaven and hell and an intersection of good and evil centered on a resplendent knight sprung from a mammoth, gruesome jawbone. And a series of paintings based on the knotted premise of ‘mask’, which systematically, through each deranged and deformed countenance, melancholically strain to covet peace yet emit a tremulous unease far from such quiet. Pahlavi holds his audience in a kind of benign albeit frightening grasp, speaking to us of glory without letting us forget the ache of torment. The artist describes this reckoning as, ‘singing the pains of the world’.

A jaded viewer must beware as he is facing, in this work, an unfettered rush of truism. Pahlavi gives us no rest, no smug criticism in which to hide, only the raw entreaty to join his chaotic almost psychotic effort to calm and quell, to understand the ramifications of nothing less than life and death as it sidles right up next to you, snuggles in and cold cocks you in the face.

“I was telling myself, that the human being can sometimes be marvellous. Those humble beings, thrown in an unchained cataclysm, their happiness crushed and despite everything, they kept encircling the body of a king who was on the point of making the great voyage towards the unknown.”- Axel Pahlavi, 2007.

Official Website: http://luxegallery.net