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VOICE CHOICE

Pasha Radetzki Loses His Ego – and Hopes You Do, Too

An old-school romantic makes glowing art for our cursedly interesting times.

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We are the world: “Portal Do Sul. Unity Portal” (2017-19).
Courtesy Pasha Radetzki

Courtesy Pasha Radetzki

 

The beating heart of Pasha Radetzki’s art is, well, the human heart — one of nature’s denser organs, which thrums with love and pain, strength and sorrow, fanciful flights and thudding reality.

Between now and November 5, you can check out Radetzki’s sculpture “Love – ego = LOV” in Union Square. The large pressed-wood surfaces of the piece are painted in glowing lime-green, sunny yellow, and radiant rose-red; horizontal slits in the broad expanses draw park-goers in to check out mini-gardens of medicinal plants native to the Americas, wittily tying the exuberant subject matter to the surrounding flora.

Radetzki’s public sculpture on the lawn at Union Square — spreading “LOV” in all directions.
RCB

 

If you’re out on a summer Friday over the next few weeks (or taking the air of a weekend), you can also visit an intimate collection of Radetzki’s working drawings, colorful sketches, maquettes, and photos documenting the artist’s far-ranging public sculptures, installations, and performances, at Jane’s Room, on Jane Street, near the Whitney.

Love on the square: Study for the Union Square public sculpture.
RCB

 

Love can be found in many guises at Jane’s Room: a graph-paper study gives insight into the evolution of the big Union Square piece. Elsewhere, blobby, anthropomorphic “L,” “O,” and “V” inkblots seemingly dance across a diagrammed floor.

Love dancing across the page.
RCB

 

In other instances, Radetzki takes things to a more visceral level, such as in a photo of red spike heels trailing slabs of raw meat, a compelling metaphor for physical desire outrunning any notions of propriety.

Meat feet meet cute.
RCB

 

Some of the images might make you wish you could transport yourself from today’s fractured America to one of Radetzki’s unifying visions, such as the drawings and photos of the 2017-19 piece “Portal Do Sul. Unity Portal.” Constructed from repurposed timber on a hilltop in Brazil, this house-size facade welcomes humanity into the vastness of the protective atmosphere we’re in the process of destroying. But Radetzki’s formal generosity, the literal openness of this structure, does what his body of work accomplishes through deft aesthetic decisions: He makes hope visible.  ❖

Pasha Radetzki: Love-ego = LOV
Jane’s Room/PRZ
78 Jane Street
Through August 18

 

 

 

 

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