Jacopo Pagin

39+ Art Space is excited to host Belgium-based Italian artist Jacopo Pagin’s 1st solo exhibition in Asia, Strategies Against Time, which is presented by Pond Society, and supported by Make Room Los Angeles.

Strategies Against Time continues Pagin’s inquiry into the shape of historical time and the role that painting performs in rendering the present as such. Through formal experiments that test the transparent properties of charcoal and oil paint, Pagin pushes the limits of pictorial space and recalls the temporal dimension of painting and drawing. Borrowing from the techniques of collage and montage, the resulting works offer an image of the past projected from the point of view of the present: a singular crisis.

In the 17th and 18th centuries, a new form of live entertainment began to spread across Europe. The phantasmagoria was a kind of theatrical show that used a device known as a magic lantern to project images from transparent slides. Paired with music, dramatic narration, and illusory effects produced by smoke and mirrors, this early precursor to film often took the occult as its subject, conjuring demons and ghosts before a terrified audience.


As the Industrial Revolution progressed into the 19th century, Marx would come to see phantasmagoria as a metaphor for the estrangement made necessary by commodity production. For Marx, this mode of production relied on a system of exchange that converted living labor into dead labor through the extraction of a value in surplus of that consumed in the time of production. Capital, appearing as both means and ends of this process, assumes a phantom autonomy that belies its origin as the product of definite social relations. At the same time, however, the dynamism of capital outstrips those relations and creates the potential for a form of social life no longer mediated by the value of an individual’s labor time. The images cast by the phantasmagoria’s lantern bring to mind not only the projectionist but the possibility of another world than ours.


Baudelaire, closely tracking the winds of change, understood that this unprecedented historical situation demanded an artistic response in kind. Avant the avant-garde, Baudelaire raised the rallying cry of modern beauty, which meant capturing the afflictions of urban life while recounting the transubstantiating spell of commodification: “The poet enjoys the incomparable privilege of being himself and someone else, as he sees fit. Like those roving souls in search of a body, he enters another person whenever he wishes. For him alone, all is open . . .”



As Walter Benjamin would later write of the flâneur, “[t]he intoxication to which [he] surrenders is the intoxication of the commodity immersed in a surging stream of customers.” The semblance of autonomy attained by modern art is thus owed to its commodity character, but to the extent that it’s able to test the limits of this freedom—by embracing it with “a total absence of illusion . . . and at the same time an unlimited commitment to it”—art points beyond the commodity form. The critical moment of aesthetic experience comes at the point where art exhausts its own efforts and yet continues to speak, its complete ambiguity reflecting the world’s.


In this new body of work by Jacopo Pagin, transparency becomes the organizing principle structuring the space of a series of paintings and drawings in which foreground, middle ground, and background give way to a sequence of images that seem to emerge from the ether before diffusing into ghostly chimeras. Their subject matter comes from a merger of automatic drawing with close studies of early 20th-century European glassware design. This combination of disjointed forms has an hallucinatory quality that uses the plasticity of charcoal and oil paint to dissolve the physical ground of the artwork. Like dreams, whose images are tethered to reality by an element of the familiar, Pagin’s constructions have an accusatory tone: their eyes peer out at the viewer; the shadows have sinister smiles. Suffused with a power greater than ours, only Rilke’s conclusion remains to be drawn: “for here there is no place / that does not see you. You must change your life.”

The exhibition will be on view at the gallery from 4 January to 26 February 2023.