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Christopher Pekoc
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.
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