“I don’t have a clue what the work is about so don’t ask me.”
This is the first thing Paul Cvetich tells me when I phone him; immediately I know that this is not going to be a straightforward interview. I had been writing a profile on the Transit Gallery’s tenth anniversary for Hamilton Magazine, and had been shown some images of Cvetich’s during an interview with Priti Kohli, the gallery’s owner. The works were so unlike anything I had seen previously by Cvetich, that I had to phone him to get some kind of grounding.
But grounding is not what Cvetich has to offer; at least not in a straightforward way.
Paul Cvetich is probably best known for his Monument to Workers Injured and Killed on the Job, a headless bronze figure clutching the top rail of a sheet of steel. For two decades it has stood in front of Hamilton’s City Hall, and it has probably engendered more love and antipathy than any other public work in this city. Regardless, the work is a good emblem of Cvetich’s obsession both with sculpture and the human form. His work, whether it be his early ragged figurative sculptures, or photographic fragments of nakedness encased in concrete, or fleshy photography reduced to strips, laid up on a wall as an almost pure abstraction-- all of it has a gravity to it, all of it orbits around the hard, even sombre mysteries of the human form.
Ichikupark, the exhibition he installed this spring at the Transit, is a series of small, equally complex, but irrefutably buoyant sculptural reliefs. They are conglomerations of a wide palette of painted wooden shapes, some geometrical, some organic and bonelike, asymmetrically connected to each other. These works seem like trans-cultural meditation objects, ones which have been stripped of any iconic or symbolic weight. Instead they seem restlessly alive. One might even be tempted to use a word that most artists revile: fun.
“I’m 63 for God’s sake, I’ve never had kids, I love my motorcycle, and have lived a life that I am really thrilled about,” he continues. He then queries me about my family, wonders if, when I write, do I think in words or images. “It’s an important distinction,” he says, and then goes back to the subject of his motorbike.
“Seeing the world on two wheels is a much more sculptural act than sitting in a car watching the outside world flatten itself into two dimensions against the windshield.”