Guten Tag

Guten Tag –“Engraving one’s name, one’s love, a date, on the wall of a building, this “vandalism” cannot be explained by the mere need for destruction. Rather, I see in it the survival instinct of all those who cannot erect pyramids and cathedrals to leave their name to posterity”. Brassaï

Pablo Tomek is a painter who lives and works in Paris. He has always rejected the Street Art label to define his work. Heard today through social networks, the mainstream press and auction houses, the movement conjures up in the collective imagination a form of bad pop art, kitschy and inoffensive. Pablo Tomek’s background is in graffiti, a cryptic, underhand, risky, clandestine approach. He cut his teeth breaking codes with his PAL bandmates.

The primitive gesture of painting, writing and signing are an integral part of Pablo Tomek’s artistic evolution.

Scribbles for some, calligraphic feats for others, Tomek’s signatures flirt with illegibility, in an unstable balance between inscription, figuration and abstraction. His tags become mosquitoes, boats, corals; they crush, expand, flatten or lengthen. They are grandiloquent, fearful, advancing or retreating, depending on the state of the scribe, his mental images, his tools or the nature of his support and fulcrum.

Through hundreds of silver and digital photos, video captures and drawings,Guten Tag bears witness to a selection of vandal inscriptions made between 2019 and 2023 by Pablo Tomek, in Paris and elsewhere. The memories of these deliberate degradations are extended by a series of poems by Skubb.