At the centre of the exhibition is a never-before-shown sculpture of the Shroud of Turin. Many more renderings of the shroud fill the gallery.
In Pauer's works, the shroud fills the entire surface of each of his canvases. It appears sometimes as a desert, a hilly landscape, the shadow of the artist, an empty bed bearing the marks of a battle between bodies or a leather surface decorated by claw-marks. The monochrome paintings rarely show anything more than the creases of paper or canvas.
The same way one recognises the shape of a body on the Shroud of Turin, it is possible to outline the eventful history of a human life in the grooves of a canvas. It is the canvas itself that provides this outline, and it becomes the subject of the painter. He paints a canvas on a canvas, a surface on a surface. Yet, these paintings are extraordinarily full of shapes; the traces of every small event are recorded on the surface.
Pauer once called himself the prophet of lies: lies that are admitted and consciously offered, as elements of the essence of art. The genre which he has invented, introduced and practiced for quite some time - called "pseudo" - is an expression of lies without the intent to deceive. Instead, it makes deception public.
Pauer had his first solo show in the 1970s. Since then, he has been involved with many different forms of art, including sculpture, painting, performance art, political commentary, set design and poetry. Two years ago, he had a retrospective that filled Budapest's Műcsarnok. In the current exhibition, he focuses on a single theme in sixty pieces that each present a different meaning, colour scheme and internal story about the shroud, its material and imprints.
Author: Eszter Götz
