Christopher Pekoc

December 27, 2011

Chris has been a good friend for many years. Recently, he won the Cleveland Arts Prize and he also had a highly successful gallery show at Convivium 33 Gallery in Cleveland. The video presentation we created about Chris and his work, The Beauty of Damage, will accompany a nationally touring exhibition. The piece pictured below is titled, “Tom’s Hand (Rearranging the Planets)” and was the cover image on the 1994 artist’s invitational at the Cleveland Museum of Art. The piece is now on view in my office, which I hope you will come and see.

An extensive catalog of Chris’ work was beautifully designed by Tim Lachina (who also did the new Telos Identity) and written by Chris and the talented art historian Henry Adams. Henry has nailed Chris to the wall with highly charged and well-written insight into the mysterious attraction of his art. Henry explains and includes the pithy quotes of others, “The pieces have been coated with shellac which gives them the appearance of having been preserved or of being very old. ‘The overall effect is one of an aged manuscript that has suffered the ravages of time.’ Frank Green has noted that ‘his collages have a Renaissance feel’ they are at once battered and gorgeous.

John Wood has compared the effect to that of the shimmering mosaics of Ravenna as well as the paintings of Gustav Klimt. Steven Litt has noted that his work  ‘is filed with a fin-de-siecle mood of gloom and decay in which beauty and pain exist side by side.’ His spirit is elegiac, if not macabre: As Litt has noted the seams look like post-operative sutures.

 

All Images © Christopher Pekoc, All Rights Reserved

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