Pablo Tomek – 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. Nowadays, with social networks, the mainstream press and auction houses, the movement conjures up in the collective imagination a form of bad, kitsch and harmless pop art . On the other hand, Pablo Tomek comes from graffiti, a cryptic, sneaky, risky and clandestine approach. As a primitive gesture of painting, writing and signing is an integral part of Pablo Tomek’s work. Scribbles for some, calligraphic masterpieces 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 can be grandiloquent, timid, advancing or retreating, depending on the state of mind of the writer, his tools or the nature of his support.

Through hundreds of film and digital photographs, video stills 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 defacements are extended by a series of poems by Skubb.