Local artist Justin Paszul will be debuting his solo show opening reception from 6-9 PM this Saturday at Space Truckin Gallery as part of the 3rd Saturday Yucca Valley Art Walk featuring 150 pieces of his vibrant mind-bending paintings and drawings. The show’s title, “OMNIGLOB UNCOVERS TEPMNHATOP UNDER THE SHADOW OF [REDACTED]” is mind-bending in itself.
When asked how to properly pronounce the convoluted name of his show, Paszul said one word, loosely pronounced TEPMNHATOP, is Russian; the way we must type it for this story isn’t even completely accurate, since the N should be backwards and pronounced as an “E.” Pazsul told Z1077 the word translates to “terminator” in English, yet not in the Arnold Schwarzenegger sense.
“I came across the word years ago looking at cosmonaut stuff. In Russian, the ‘terminator’ is the dividing line between day and night on a planet, that separates the shadow of the sun, you know, the shadow of the back of the planet from the right side of the planet—that line is the terminator. I saw that word once on a Russian moon map and it was just a fascinating word I keep coming back to.”
Further playful with interpretive intrigue, Paszul says the [REDACTED] part of the name isn’t so much concealing anything as much as inviting the audience to put whatever word they want in its place.
Now to speak of Pazsul’s actual art; to call it mind-bending or psychedelic barely does justice to these deceptively two-dimensional visuals that not only pop with their vibrant colors but appear nearly sentient in their joyfully incongruent composition. While Pazsul draws from the mundane—people in waiting rooms, sitting around on their phones—he depicts these characters not as normal humans, but as abstract, geometric beings often melding into the environment.
“I like the juxtaposition of a banal scene with figures and things going on around it that are completely out of place in the scene but still sort of fit in the world… it’s more of like accumulations of shapes in dimensions that don’t always fit together, more of an agglomeration than a melting because melting I see as reductive as opposed to a congealing of forms.”
When asked what people can expect at his debut show this Saturday, Paszul suggested the idea of a secret narrative beyond the visual.
“I’m always trying to create the illusion of narrative where there isn’t necessarily one, with the titles, the imagery, and repeating subject matter. I pull a lot from comic book design but not necessarily the actual narrative content of the comics, using visual signifiers like panels and speech bubbles but in a way that takes them out of the narrative. So, if I do it right, there will be the illusion of a narrative without me having to go through the work of writing one.”
