Matt Paweski: Table Setting

To describe is to tell of details, colors, shapes, sounds, tastes, textures, masses, voids, brilliances, blemishes in such a way that the recipient of the description can reconstruct a thing in their mind. Experiences, objects, people, places can all be described, well or poorly, though a bad description is not necessarily unfruitful, and a good one not necessarily enjoyable. In fact wondrous things have often come from inexact descriptions, such as Blake’s illuminated prints or the creatures drawn in medieval manuscripts. A description can be boring, but it need not be. It can describe the physical or the immaterial, mundane or fantastical and the describer is not obligated to distinguish between the two. Matt Paweski is a virtuoso describer in form and his latest work plays this interpretive game of telephone with the work of the great Austrian designer, master of ornament, and energizer of the second phase of the Wiener Werkstätte, Dagobert Peche.

Matt Paweski’s engagement with Peche enters into the historical dialogue between craftsmanship and mass production, between ornamentation and austerity. This form vs. function conflict would define the production of the modern era, causing the association of reduction with refinement. Paweski’s project is to recover what was lost in the overzealousness of this attitude. His Polished Gourd for instance, alludes to Peche’s 1920 whimsical silver Box in the shape of a pumpkin, a box which truly evades the common understanding of box-ness. In Paweski’s hands, Peche’s sensuousness enters back into the rigidity which often defines machined processes.

A common critique of Peche’s designs was that in all their ornament, they did not adequately suggest their own use. A critic of Peche’s contributions to the 1920 ÖMKI exhibition remarked: “Peche’s works lack the chief component of all craftsmanship: a simple comprehension of what is required to fulfill a given purpose and how to give it artistic form. And with its soundness, the vital force of something natural.” Perhaps what this particular critic was responding to was the reappearance of the gap between reality and effect, hand and eye. 

Writing about Peche’s metalwork, Elisabeth Schmuttermeier says “In contrast to Josef Hoffman whose artistic roots were in architecture, Peche could not disguise his bent for drawing.” Paweski’s sculptures take a similar view of drawing—it is the base for further realities, for sculptural forms that while inescapably dimensional, could nonetheless be called graphic. They alternate between an almost cartoon toylikeness (calling to mind the old Looney Tunes gag of a character being run over, only to peel themselves up like newsprinted silly putty off the road), and the most refined, pristine dinnerware, which would not be out of place in Werkstatte patron Fritz Waerndorfer’s service. Paweski’s process of drawing, creating template shapes, and then making working models in cardboard re-enchants the hardness of aluminum through the use of more malleable stand ins.

Each of Paweski’s sculptures feature smooth, impossible, compact surfaces—like organs, faces, or household objects, solid but not dense, prominently featuring their own voids, meant to fit in a given space or be easily hefted by the hand. His titles often hint at possible subjects (bonnets, vessels, bouquets, gourds, cuffs, timepieces, lamps, shelves) but more often they are hybridized; crossbred between animal, vegetable and mineral. There is a working atomism behind them, that out of a limited palette of materials, an abundance of forms can come into existence. 

Paweski’s forms suggest a kindred fascination with sea creatures, especially those—mollusks, oysters, snails—which refuse to present a coherent inside and outside, that insist upon their own labrynthianess. Paweski’s sculptural surfaces partake in mollusk logic. At first glance, you believe you could explain them simply, as if to a child, but when you attempt such a description, they evade your geometric vocabulary, your mental catalog of color swatches, your encyclopedic knowledge of fastenings, your comprehensive dictionary of finishes. Paweski’s table setting places these disparate “descriptions'' in proximity to each other, spilling them out onto the tabletop, somewhere between the tipped bucket of a child’s collection of curiosities from a day in the tide pools, and the carefully laid out elements of a glimmering Peche tea service tray.

The table is the site of discussion, of studying, of work, of unconcealment. It is an agreed upon form and forum for hashing things out. The term “table setting” itself suggests a set pattern, a way of laying down the basic serving elements so that culinary invention can happen on top of them. It is the embodiment of Gustave Flaubert’s famous quote in his letter to Gertrude Tennant: “Be regular and orderly in your life like a bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in your work.” Counterintuitively, a repetition of base forms is necessary for discovery

This is why patterns and templates have a long history in architecture and the decorative arts, they are proven and translatable forms which work over and over again. Any graceful curves or surprising reversals are presaged by flat templates that hang in stacks on shop walls, each waiting in the wings to perform. These patterns, jigs and templates along with saws, files and burnishers are a hidden vocabulary, similar to the cartoons of the Renaissance masters, drawings at full scale with their lines perforated and pounced with pigment onto the final canvas. They are the workaday techniques that produce the enchantment of the final object.

It’s just that word, “enchantment,” that best describes Paweski’s table setting, a word that implies the impossibility of being pinned down and a failure of the senses to grasp just what it is that captivates us. In his sculptures’ relationships to each other and to the external world, Paweski “takes the side of things,” he revels in their inability to be completely encompassed by description. The table becomes a metaphor for an array of references, but most importantly, it becomes the place of presentation, where the viewer must make of them what they will. 

by Darling Green

Matt Paweski (b. 1980; Detroit, Michigan) lives and works in Los Angeles. He received an MFA from Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, CA. Paweski is represented by Gordon Robichaux, New York and Herald St, London.

He has presented solo exhibitions at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT (2023); Gordon Robichaux, New York (2021 and two-person with Sanou Oumar, 2018); Herald Street, London (2020, 2017, 2014); Octagon, Milan (2019); Park View / Paul Soto, Los Angeles (2018); Lulu, Mexico City (with Ella Kruglyanskaya, 2018); Ratio 3, San Francisco (2016); and South Willard, Los Angeles (2015, 2013, 2012).

Group exhibitions include White Columns (curated by Mary Manning), New York; La MaMA Galleria (curated by Sam Gordon), New York; Wallspace, New York; Parker Gallery, Los Angeles; South Willard, Los Angeles; Octagon, Milan; Librairie Yvon Lambert, Paris; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; kurimanzutto, Mexico City; and Goldsmiths, London.

His work has been reviewed and featured in numerous publications, including The New Yorker, The New York Times, Apartamento, Mousse, Contemporary Art Review Los Angeles, Contemporary Art Daily, Artforum, Los Angeles Review of Books, Artnet, Dwell Magazine, Art in America, Flash Art, and New York Times T Magazine. In 2020, his first monograph, MP.19, was published by Zolo Press.