Paul Majek ‘s artistic journey is set in a delicate space where the human figure resists a fixed form or identity. Characters appear, vanish, and gather again on the paintings, standing at the edge between being seen and being wiped out. This changeability is not just a matter of style; it serves as an intellectual structure through which the artist probes the issues of recollection, spirituality, and the endurance of emotional states. His artworks are not about identifying the body but rather emphasizing the concept of being flux.
In Majek’s paintings, each time, color is the vehicle in which the tension is variously expressed. In the earlier works where the cool blues were predominant, the tonalities there suggest sentiments of remoteness and emotional reservedness. On the other hand, the use of reds, ochres, and earth tones in the later pieces implies the human shift of going deeper into the characters’ inner feelings and the level of getting excited. The colors here do not work as a tool for visual description but rather for emotion; they could signal the changes in the state of mind. The change in colors in the artist’s work seems to function like a mirror of the journey that goes deeper and deeper into vulnerability and presence.
words: yannis kostarias
The viewer can sense the physical nature of Majek’s painting work. Paint is piled up, wiped off, and sometimes scraped through in a cycle of revealing and concealing, unveiling a whole history in the layers. Unformed human silhouettes, semi-abstract body postures create a strong visual language on his canvases without presenting a definite set of ideas. Usually, the human figure is depicted without distinctive features and still serves more as vessel an esoteric tension and vitality. In a broader viewing scale, the depicted energy of the human-bodily form aspects manages to shape the forms and provide the necessary rhythm of the figures and their environment. Majek does not give the viewer any quick answers, rather it keeps his audience pondering and ensuring to deal with his painting surface as an equal space for further visual or spiritual observation.
For example, in ‘Love Mislead’ (2024), the two figures are compressed tightly to the wood panel and leaning closely into each other, their gesture denoting closeness and physical touch. The dominant palette is a fully saturated red-orange, overlaid with darker tones which follow the contours of the figures but do not strongly separate them visually. The brushwork seems to be fluid and atmospheric; the edges fade away into the field around them so the figures can barely be seen as separate from the ground. Instead of drawing the outlines of the figures, the artist depicts them with tonal density and repeated pigment, thus evoking a feeling of warmth and inner vibration. Overall, the image is a great combination of intimacy and spaciousness where the color remarkably fulfills the architectural function as much as the form.
In ‘It Ends with Me’ (2024), an upright and lone figure occupies the center of a vertically arranged orange field. Around the figure, there are green and red botanical shapes that set the composition and also provide a rhythmic contrast. The combination of the highly saturated orange base with the bright green accents results in a very strong visual tension. Here, the figure is quite detached but still connected to its plant surroundings through the repeated color elements and vertical brush strokes. The overall result is impactful: the scheme emits energy and tension while at the same time the painting result is balanced.
Majek’s paintings seem to render a continuous state of becoming like being in an ongoing challenge for form and meaning; saving significant space for vulnerability, memory and transformation creates an influential viewing experience where his body of work invites the viewer to feel something which feels quite familiar but continuously in flux, too.
How would you define your work in a few words (ideally in 3 words)?
Spiritual, Memory, Fluidity.
Figures in your art frequently look like ghosts that are constantly wavering between manifestation and disappearance. What kind of expression does this fluctuation give you that a steadier figure would not?
I think the elusive figure speaks to certain truths about myself. The figures being there and not there feels spiritual. It also means the viewer has to make a decision about the figure’s presence. How concrete do you want them to be? What do you want to project through them?
I leave these absences in my work because I am trying to allow myself the freedom to express my own experiences through the people I draw from. I am also transforming the source material, which is usually archival imagery of my family, some from as early as the 60s and some from the 80s. I enjoy drawing from these images, the scenes, the spaces, the interiors, the people.
This began as a way of honouring my family. Some of these people I did not recognize, friends of my mother from before I was born. It then became something else. Some of my works include figures from these archives, but they have been transformed into different people, you could say spirits or shadows of themselves. Some of my altar works try to stay true to the likeness of whomever I am depicting. But sometimes I move away from likeness, or from a steady presence at all. The figure becomes merged, one with its surroundings.
You depict memory in your art not so much as a story but as a feeling. In what way do memories, be they personal or inherited, influence the emergence of your figures?
Memory is something I have always been deeply invested in, but even more recently, its fleetingness and my relationship with my own memory. The things I decide to forget and the things I decide to remember. The things I cannot control.
Some memories are ingrained in us, in our bodies and in our minds. Sometimes what you try so hard to hold onto leaves first and becomes the hardest to recall. Sometimes I get annoyed at myself for forgetting the “fun facts,” as I call them, the things people expect you to know by memory. It is almost like I do not have space for them. I believe memory is a precious thing, and we must truly look after it and be intentional about how we use it.
The question almost answers itself. I sometimes do not remember the details of the story, but I never forget the feeling.
The figures come from a multitude of places, but they all exist in in-between spaces, wavering between visibility and disappearance. The archive is like a frozen memory from a distant past. It presents as steady or contained, but it is instead like water. It is ever changing, and it is almost by chance that it still exists decades after it was taken. There is something quite alluring about the archive. It is precious and sacred.
The figures sometimes come from my memory or dreams, from archives, from life, from drawings, from previous works, from paint, from pastels. The material sometimes does all the work. One place they all derive from is internal truth, something spiritual, subconscious, and unknown.
There is an evident conversation between earlier works with blue shades and newer ones with orange and ochres. Can you tell us how this change in colors mirrors changes in your emotional or conceptual focus?
The relationship I have with memory is similar to my relationship with colour. They both feel internal and subconscious, something that does not have a specific source. By that I mean colour, to me, is something that is completely felt. Sometimes it overwhelms you. Sometimes it whispers and creeps up on you while your attention is elsewhere. It can also choose you, not the other way around, almost like how people describe your family. You are born into it. You learn to love it in its fullness.
Blue and I were closely tied for up to five years. I was solely using that colour, especially when I was making work that was coming from the truest place. Once I found blue, all the reasons why I was using it started to flood in, but blue stayed the same.
It began with an exploration of darkness and blackness, figures emerging from dark spaces, which I would call shadow figures. It was me exploring memory, dreams, and my experience as a child with an overactive imagination. I would often see things before going to bed and when just waking up. I thought they came from a kind of black tone, which I did explore while thinking about artists like Kerry James Marshall. But that black quickly turned into blue, and I knew I had found something that hit deep inside me and was visually alluring.
It was the colour just before dawn that would fill my bedroom. It felt like a lucid dream or sleep paralysis, which is often how many blue paintings would come to me. I was thinking about the blue from adire, traditional Yoruba materials. I was thinking of the blue periods of artists before me. I really had the time and space to explore what blue meant to me. It was an exploration, an experimentation, figuring it out, maybe even an obsession.
Orange was a colour that whispered and crept up on me. In colour theory it may seem like the obvious choice because of its complementary relation to blue, but I do not believe that was my reasoning. I began seeing mainly two colours when I would shut my eyes in the shower. It would usually be blue slowly shifting into a fiery orange. So I started making paintings with orange and blue, but I abandoned them because it was not the colours together that attracted me. It felt wrong. So I made monochromatic worlds in orange, similar to the mostly monochromatic blue works, and this felt right.
Most of your figures appear as strangers but at the same time they share an intimacy. Could you please elaborate on the role of anonymity in your investigation of identity and generational experience?
The figures in my work can appear as strangers because they sometimes are strangers, or strange. But they come from the family archive, which adds a familiarity or an unknown connection to them. Some of them passed away before I was born, or we have lost contact with them over the years.
I am always battling with choices around concealing and transparency. How much of a person do I want to share with others, as well as with myself? The intergenerational dialogue in the work has always been intriguing to me, especially when I am working from imagery of my grandparents.
My grandmother passed away almost two years ago, and I made a piece to honour her. While working from a few archival images of her, I truly felt guided by her in how to approach the work, how to capture her expression, the clothes she wore, the setting she is located in. I was almost a conduit for her and how she wanted to be remembered. I am still so grateful for the experience. The work is called “It Ends With Me.”
My practice also interrogates anonymity and intimacy through an exploration of fluid queerness and how this fluidity relates to my identity. My work drawing from the ethereal archive and ideas of family long existed in parallel with my exploration of fluid desire, but they are now beginning to converge. Concealment in my work is a covered space, a blur. Édouard Glissant’s “right to opacity” suggests that opacity or anonymity is not secrecy but the irreducibility of personhood. Through materiality and what is veiled or revealed, my aim is to resist reduction.
It is about uncovering and loving oneself slowly, a wilderness where there is no place to hide, leaving behind a sense of home, being seen and the tensions of familial judgment, the feeling of leaving one’s body in search of escape and fugitivity. Ori Mi, Ara Mi, “My Head, My Body” in Yoruba, refers to the head as the container of the soul. In my paintings, the figure and the head are prominent but not always solid or visible. Visibility exists on a spectrum of opacity and clarity, which I navigate carefully to manage access to the souls of the people I depict.
Your paintings come across as if they have multiple layers, are aged, or partly erased. What is the significance of covering and uncovering both in your art and in your technique?
The questions seep into each other so well that it seems like I begin answering one before I get to it. Layering in my work allows me to shift between opacity and transparency. I achieve this with materials like oil, acrylic, and charcoal on wood, canvas, and paper.
Wood is of particular interest to me because of how it reacts to paint compared to canvas or paper. Working with wood is more like staining than painting, which feels like uncovering. Like I am looking for something that already exists within the surface. This feeling also comes from the wood’s grain, which is a visual language in itself, expressing something about the surface that I am then able to collaborate with or cover. I usually enjoy working with the grain, leaning toward a more transparent layering of paint. But in recent works I have found it exciting to completely cover or conceal the grain and allow it to peek through in a less curated way.
I often combine painting with found or domestic objects. Earlier blue works were made on found plywood, which sometimes had aged or developed inconsistencies in its colour from being outside. This approach to materiality connects to ideas of disembodiment, remnants, and lost and found within my work, also characteristics of the family archive that I am drawn to. The visual archives I work from are mostly kept in good condition, but some have been damaged over time, bled into each other, or begun to tear. All of these traces begin to enter the paintings in ways I cannot predict or control, which I really enjoy.
I find monotypes especially suited to my practice, sitting at the intersection of painting and printmaking because of this relationship to control and the lack of it; an uncovering. My approach to monoprinting is quite painterly and unpredictable. Working with ink on the plate, you never quite know the outcome. The reductive monoprint technique, in which the entire plate is inked and then wiped away to create an image, begins to feel like an unearthing.
What about the place where you work? What’s your studio space look like?
My studio space is like my bedroom, very specifically organized chaos. Everything is in its place, even though to the untrained eye it may look like a hot mess.
I am writing this in my studio now, so I am looking around. There are some reeds and bamboo, lots of canvases, as I am working toward a show, curated by my sister, Rita Majek. There is an old ceiling fan on the floor, beside some cushions I use when I work on the floor, which is most of the time, pastels spread across the floor, a small blue table with all my brushes and oil paints, and my palette with very thinned out oil paint from a week ago.
I have been in a state of reflection, writing, and sketching, before returning to a large scale canvas waiting in my studio. The work seemed almost done, but the idea I have for it will completely shift the composition and focal point of the painting.
Which are your plans for the near future?
I am currently eager to take part in some artist residencies this year, to get away from the city and really hone in on the new energies and subjects entering the work. I am excited about that.
I have a few group shows coming up in the next few months, so I am preparing for those at the moment. As I mentioned, I am also working toward a solo show curated by my sister.
Later in the year I will be part of a show by SADESIX, a family art collective, with my siblings. We will all be showing work together for the first time.
All imagess courtesy of the artist