A Secret Plot: In Conversation with Tom Pazderka

By Bay Hallowell

In early 2017, I visited Tom Pazderka’s studio at UCSB’s Red Barn shortly before he completed his MFA. Now, five years later, Pazderka has evolved into a noted artist, set to have his second solo exhibition, One Day I Will Disappear, at the Bender Gallery in Asheville, North Carolina. I reconnected with Pazderka at his Ojai studio/gallery, A Secret Plot, to learn more about his creative, professional and philosophical projects. 

Bay Hallowell: A recent painting based on a photograph of your parents’ leather shop that includes you as a boy piqued my curiosity. When and how did you move from the Czech Republic to the US?  

Tom Pazderka: In 1994, when I was 12 years old, I moved from the Czech Republic to New York City. My home country had split with Slovakia two years before and witnessed the Velvet Revolution in 1989. In less than five years, we saw a major political and economic upheaval in the country, but I wasn’t really that aware of what the ramifications were at the time. Daily life was mostly the same, but I did notice subtle changes in school, at home and on the streets. Overnight, there were advertising billboards everywhere, people were allowed to travel, and politics were discussed openly. There was an air of freedom, but I also think a general anxiety underneath it all. The future was uncertain and not many people knew where things were headed. 

It turns out that the 1990s were to become a very Wild West kind of decade in the Czech Republic – very sex, drugs and rock’n’roll. But while tourists were streaming into the country, many Czechs were streaming out, the way they did in 1948 and 1968. We were a part of a large migration of citizens out of the country. As soon as I landed in NYC, my parents applied for a green card for me. Two years later, my stepfather’s employer moved and opened up a factory in North Carolina – and that’s how I ended up in the land of cotton and tobacco. 

Tom Pazderka, The Card Game, ash, charcoal and oil on burned panel

Some of your paintings feature majestic, billowing clouds or huge, foreboding mountains – seductive, compelling images generic enough to engender a wide range of responses in viewers.  Yet many of your paintings focus on specific historical events and specific historical figures, emblematic of good and evil at play, probing the most provocative political and spiritual problems of our day.  

In Katharos, which means “a soul cleansing,” you depict a roomful of elementary school students pledging allegiance to the American flag as they raise their arms in the original salute, a salute similar to one used later by German Nazis and Italian Fascists (which the US Congress changed in 1942 to the hand-over-heart salute used ever since).  

You also paint portraits of famous dictators and title them The Shoemaker, The Teacher, The Bus Driver, and The Cook, impressing upon viewers that Nicolae Ceausescu, Pol Pot, Nicolas Maduro and Idi Amin Dada were “normal,” professional people before they became dictators.  

Your painting of a cathedral is titled Deus Absconditus, a phrase used by Martin Luther to describe the absence of God in precisely the place where God is most sought. 

To me, all this work is reminiscent of German artists, especially Gerhard Richter and Anselm Kiefer, and their preoccupation with German history. Do you feel an affinity with these artists?

I feel a connection to post-war German art in general, because it seems to be an attempt to reconcile itself with the history and tradition of ultra-nationalism. In the Czech Republic and the former Eastern Bloc in general, there is also this kind of push to really figure out what the twentieth century meant (not just to artists) and an attempt to reconcile its past with the present. 

I think I share a lot of affinity with those artists – Pitin, Ghenie, Savu, Sasnal, just to name a few – because we’re within the same age range, having been born into the interregnum between existing communism and capitalist realism.  

German artists were hoping for some sort of great reckoning with its Nazi past, which obviously never came, and this made for some very potent images. Joseph Beuys used fat and felt in his work a lot because those were materials directly connected to the horrors of Nazism – felt socks for German soldiers were made out of the human hair of concentration camp victims, for example.  

Tom Pazderka, The Country Doctor, ash, charcoal and oil on burned panel

On the other hand, I sense the US is somewhat lagging in this respect behind its European counterparts. Perhaps, partly because the US is, despite its recent pretenses to the contrary, still very conservative, and it is harder for artists who have real social issues on their minds to break through. Everything has to be wrapped up in the cloak and language of business and branding, which makes for a strange paradox, because many artists’ brands rise on the premise of being anti-capitalist.   

In my work, the focus isn’t so much on the politics of the day. I like using language and telling stories through images, so the titles are a very important part of that storytelling. There’s a bit of politics in the background, but I’m more interested in the social anxieties that surround us. I also want the audience to do a bit of work, because I believe that art isn’t just meant to look pretty on a wall or have a specific value attached to it. Most of the time, the titles are a clue. Like in a Beuys work, when you know what the materials stand for, it opens up a whole new world of meaning. This is also why I started working primarily with ash and burned surfaces.   

Tom Pazderka, Nostalgie XV, ash, charcoal and oil on burned panel

You’ve set up your studio/gallery, A Secret Plot, with an unerring eye for efficient uses of space. Some of your paintings depict the architecture of cabins built by Henry David Thoreau or Ted Kaczynski, men who led solitary lives (unlike yours) – lives which led Thoreau to write meditative, inspirational books, and Kaczynski to methodically plan and execute murders. How closely do you identify with the desire of these men for solitude and the paradoxical fine line between sanity and insanity?  

I read both Thoreau and Kaczynski’s books and surprisingly there are a lot of parallels in the outlook both men had on the world surrounding them. We shouldn’t forget that Kaczynski’s particular point of view comes partly from the abuse he suffered at Harvard as an unwitting subject in the MK Ultra psychological experiments that were designed to probe the deepest recesses of the human subconscious. Kaczynski’s turn to the dark side coincides with his time at Harvard and it’s not a surprise that he directed his anger toward academics, because in his mind, they were directly engaging in a callous and dangerous experiment, the technological advancement of humanity. 

We find the same strain of thought in Thoreau, except his anger was a bit more diffuse. To him, it was the ignorance of the petty bourgeoise that perpetuated the cycle of abuse and slavery which he saw dragging humanity down into its own self-destruction, something that Kaczynski was also deeply aware of. In both Thoreau and Kaczynski, we seem to have a case for the bipolar nature of the American Eden. In Walden, we have Thoreau’s idyllic pastoralism and anti-political rhetoric; while in Industrial Society and Its Future, Kaczynski takes Thoreau’s argument to its logical end – abuse of and by others is directed inward; the Modern is abusive.   

It isn’t necessary to be a recluse to arrive at such conclusions, but it does help. The recluse has always been a figure to revere and fear. I’d argue though that mobs and group-think are much more volatile and dangerous than any recluse has ever been. The archetype of a Kaczynski is actually quite rare but it’s overrepresented in the media.

There was a disproportionate amount of attention given to the crimes of Kaczynski. Perhaps what makes him more “dangerous” is that his acts of violence were ideologically driven and they struck a chord in some spaces of the general public.  

Wars over resources, land and political power kill and displace countless more people than a single individual with an AR-15 or pipe-bomb, but psychologically, we’re more traumatized by seemingly random stochastic violence occurring in a place that looks a lot like the one we occupy. That is how terrorism is able to project itself into our psyche. 

I built my studio/gallery not so much with attention to how it might be related to the Thoreau/Kaczynski cabin project, but rather to function as a space for the exploration of the strange, weird and eerie. A Secret Plot is another one of those double meanings that I think fits well with the Thoreau/Kaczynski narrative and with my personal interest and fascination with the darker side of existence.  

Your mostly black and white paintings incorporate ashes brushed onto bare wood salvaged from used packing crates that you burn – a practice originally inspired by California’s wildfires. The warm tones and textures of the wood sometimes show through. Occasionally, you add a bit of color. The paintings are simultaneously primal yet sophisticated, austere yet sumptuous, conceptual yet painterly. More paradoxes. Is your embrace of paradox a series of conscious decisions, a deliberate aesthetic strategy, or does it develop organically and intuitively?

The work as a whole is still an evolving process, an evolving story being told in real time. For me, the hidden or secret component to my work is the idea of incompleteness. That’s why I work in black and white, and that’s why I also reproduce photographs – but in such a way that when you get close to them you see the material and the surface – and these become very abstract. I mean, even in physics, we’re told that at the center of everything is nothing. The building blocks of space are empty if you go deep enough. 

Tom Pazderka, Angels of the New Light, ash, charcoal and oil on burned panel

Theologically, I’ve heard that God might have created the universe as incomplete on purpose because a universe that is complete is stagnant. But the most eye-opening assertion that I’ve come across is the notion that one’s head is the site of the ultimate void. Where your head is, is really a big blank in your perception. As you look around, you can see everything but your head. Even when you look into the mirror, what you see is your head in reverse. You’ll never be able to see yourself as others see you. Your head remains a complete blank and this, I believe, is what creates the fundamental incompleteness of one’s experience of the world. 

I’d argue further that we live in a world of paradoxes and many are created artificially. If you look at the internet, it is a world within a world, a self-replicating runaway world. It is, in many ways, trying to rebuild what already exists in the real world, just in a different way. The paradox is that this world is full of contradictions. What was meant to be the ultimate freeing experience has become one of the most sophisticated ways of spying and surveillance. What was meant to be for end-users to experience a world without corporate and government coercion is now dominated precisely by those interests. 

What’s strange is that we believe we can easily occupy both worlds at the same time, but experience tells us that we can’t. Attention can only be given to one or the other. On top of that, our real existence is supplemented by our online existence, which creates multiples of “ourselves.” Basically, our online, self-created selves get to live entirely separate from us – independent and subject to different forces. There are now different “classes” of online ghosts – not in human form, but in data form, in images, inside social media groups, on Google Maps and so on. My work is a commentary on these and many other, more subtle subjects. 

I started painting the Santa Barbara fires in 2016. But since the get go, I didn’t want to fall into the trap that many artists fall into, which is just parroting what they see happening around them. I didn’t want to just make paintings about the fires. The fires were, and still are, powerful symbols of the beautiful and terrifying nature that surrounds us. But before I slip into some sort of neo-Romanticism, I have to say that ash clouds and clouds in general were something that I was already working with for several years prior to this series. They were often a reference to cloud computing or cloud information storage that was at the time becoming the norm.    

With the Santa Barbara fires, for the first time, I actually witnessed a natural disaster like this, but with enough distance to see the absolutely awe-inspiring ash clouds that they produce. Many of them looked like monsters and others reached so high up into the atmosphere as to become smooth and shaped like nuclear explosions. With the new materials at my disposal and a renewed interest in painting – after I spent a few years as a conceptual artist – the work just took off.