Pablo Tomek is a painter-sculptor-photographer but first and foremost a painter-painter, a rag picker for the Capitalocene age. In 2016, his exhibition ‘Travaux Publics’ [‘Public Works’] occupied the exterior arches of the Palais de Tokyo with a succession of monumental compositions inspired by industrial painting techniques. Tomek here completes this piece with a performative pictorial intervention across the windows of the Palais de Tokyo, currently under renovation. He adopts the movements of workers and pushes them to their limits in a form of painting that oscillates between abstraction and (dis)figuration.

Tomek’s studio of choice is the street: the disorder of the outside world is his playground, and he pirates the cityscape through unauthorized and illegal paintings. The drama of urban life serves as the artist’s precarious material, and enters into his studio practice through his various wanderings where chance encounters meet “outlandish details and mystical phases drawn from the city.” Tomek works through the superimposition of successive layers, incorporating mistakes, deletions, and corrections to create works that are akin to digital palimpsests. They evoke the biting and subversive language of graffiti, the heritage of abstract expressionism, and the techniques of industrial painting. Whitewash, mortar applied with trowels to wall off abandoned architectural structures, shamanic inscriptions traced out in fluorescent colours on concrete, the destruction of painting with pressure-washers: these are just some of the partial languages that Tomek manipulates to attain his perfectly impure paintings.