#paulwackers

Paul Wackers

The Presentation of Choices Made, 48x50

Acrylic and Spraypaint on Panel

In The Presentation of Choices Made, painter Paul Wackers has rendered for us a representational image of a space within a dreamish room. He handles his paint in a smooth and almost illustrative style. The objects portrayed are realistic, but not overly so.

Implied walls hang in the near distance, a tastelessly delightful shade of rotten avocado green. Filling a majority of the picture plane is some kind of surrealistic vanity display case. Beside it, a stringy-trunked palm-like potted plant. A light fixture akin to what often hangs over a dinghy pool table hovers above the display case; in its illumination we see that the room is hazy, like a slacker's dorm room, rank with potent marijuana smoke.

In fact, everything in this painting seems to be aesthetically conspiring to remind us of a seedy  kind of 1970s stale-bongwater-and-shag-carpets mentality; a beaded curtain hangs in the right foreground, behind it some groovy abstract artwork hangs on the far wall. The floor beneath the odd curio case offers the muted shades of poorly matched hardwood boards. And then there's the case itself, and the items within. It is a strange assortment to see in a case such as this. We see two potted plants (one cannot help but feel that this adds to the Spicoli-esque '70s crash pad mystique—after all, potted plants are a stoner's best friend), some odd sculptural elements (much of it resembles failed projects from a high school pottery class) and other odd folk-art kinds of bric-a-brac, elevated to level of psuedo-cosmic talismans.

It's confounding, as a painting, in that it seems to know much but convey little. There is a kind of humor in it's understated shagginess as contrasted with it's larger-than-life title, but at the edges of our experience viewing this piece there is a hint of sadness, a hollow sort of feeling, like the stale disappointment of a fading dream. I think the key to this element lies in what I described earlier as the look of “failed” high school pottery projects. If these curios do indeed represent choices made, we can only glean from this abject collection that more often than not the wrong choice was made.