WORKS

JUDE PAULI: ZIGGURAT

November 2nd – December 14th, 2024

La Loma is pleased to announce its third solo exhibition with Los Angeles-based artist Jude Pauli.

The structural similarities between a Mesopotamian Ziggurat—a rectangular stepped tower with successively receding levels—and one of Jude Pauli’s imitable stacked ceramics are readily perceptible. Like the ancient form of monumental architecture, Pauli’s sculptures comprise numerous hand-mixed clay parts arranged one above the other and share an organic texture and earthen cast. Less apparent yet equally significant is that the most well-known ziggurat in history, the Tower of Babel, is considered the biblical birthplace of all cultures and languages.

In more ways than one, Pauli’s segmented ceramics, with their asterisks, discs, skittery lines, arrows, orbs, cones, and dashes, appear like a physicalized language. Composed vertically, like archaic cuneiform, the three-dimensional symbols and glyphs form words, sentences, and stories whose meaning is entirely alien and intrinsic, even primal. Pauli’s new series of mesmerizing Flashe paintings, composed of prints made from her ceramic segments, build on this linguistic framework two- dimensionally.

The playful simplicity of the geometric shapes and modular constructions is redolent of childhood’s secret messages, made-up languages, and artisanal tinkering. Along with their human-sized proportions, this levity and verve also lend the sculptures their anthropomorphic quality. Arranged together, the ceramic figures resemble characters in a play dressed in elaborate pseudo-robotic costumes on an elevated stage.

Considering the refined elegance and seeming inevitability of their formal constructions, it’s unsurprising that Pauli worked as a designer for nearly twenty years. Similar to her approach to design, her artistic process begins with an exacting sketch of each sculpture, which she adheres to throughout the building and firing phases. Only at the end, during assembly, do improvisation and spontaneity come into play. Then, not unlike a child with their blocks, she arranges and rearranges the parts, swapping in older pieces and remaking new ones until the figure can stand or the sentence is complete.

The paintings emerged from this assemblage process: The various auxiliary parts strewn around her workspace left imprints and outlines on the concrete, inspiring her to try printing with them. Applying the same sensibility and aesthetic rigor to her canvases, she lays out the shapes along an imperceptible grid and sticks to straight lines and hard angles save for the occasional full or half circle. After printing, she paints the negative space, adding striped patterns and flourishes of tangerine, sage, and lilac to the otherwise monochromatic compositions.

The resulting abstractions appear both like the shadow play cast by the towering figures and transcriptions of their linguistic content. No matter the translation, their meaning, urgent and enduring, need not be read but felt instead.