We live in a space shared between algorithms and movement. And we have learned that this space, precise and moving, can be grasped through each attachment point (representing myself for example) that takes and gives support, solidarity with all the other disseminated points. Each point gives us location. But we still dream without a doubt, in isolation, of a sky of still stars that would never change. If we go to Padova, and look up to the barrel vault of the chapel painted by Giotto for the tomb of the Scrovegni spouses, we’ll see, without any Euclidean distance, primitive and quiet stars acting in our eyes, wonderful, in the velvet of the soft blue pigment that gives us shelter. Is that what we really want, the rest and the whirlwind? The rumble and the contemplation? This is undoubtedly the intention of Robert Pan’s paintings. If they belong to the “peinture plane” movement through their illusions and perspectives, they are also reliefs through their shaped contours sometimes lumpy and sometimes smooth, and through their fixed points in the essence of the resin. Between the perfection of the shimmer and the roughness of the crater, his paintings are both the edgeless scope and the precise map of coordinates, landmarks and spots. Viewed up close, they blur the delineation and the distance, revealing small asperities, and with more distance, unveiling a picture filled with paint, colorful sensations, piles, coagulations, expansions or holes. Robert Pan, whose workshop is located in the Italian Dolomites (a less than two hours drive to go to Padova), says about the enigmatic titles of his paintings (11.WT 2,051 TE, a very Giottian blue painting) : “I spread my material and it becomes a coordinate, like a nebula you cannot locate.” This Ad Astra is the result of a patient and long series of technical processes: he spreads the resin on the canvas, he adds the colors, abrades the surface, repeatedly, until a kind of glaze is reached, at last. Visual oscillation and patience in the azure, each work, one might say, acts through print and trace to convey the trouble of a deep, complex and mysterious time.
