Executed in 2006, John Chamberlain’s Pasâdé Paar-Buckle exemplifies the artist’s dynamic experimentations with material and space. Chamberlain’s sculptures, assembled from discarded artifacts of industrial production, meld traditional modes of artmaking through their fusion of painting and sculpture. An intimate work comprised of twisting steel strikingly cast in contrasting planes of black and white, Pasâdé Paar-Buckle brings to the fore Chamberlain’s unrelenting interrogations of space, form, and medium that occupied the artist’s decades-long career."I’ve always wondered if you could make [the sculpture] so that you wouldn’t know what size it was. I figured that that was the best way that I could ever define what scale was: you can’t tell the size of it." —John Chamberlain
Chamberlain’s original artistic breakthrough occurred in 1957 with the creation of Shortstop, his first sculpture created from discarded automotive parts; from that point in time until his death in 2011, Chamberlain unyieldingly questioned and dispelled the apparent limitations on form imposed by media, creating an oeuvre defined not only by its unconventional use of material but also marked by the myriad ways the artist manipulated it. Pasâdé Paar-Buckle belongs to a series of works created in 2006 in which the artist attempted to disrupt the physical presence of the artwork; Pasâdé Paar-Buckle dislocates the viewer’s perception of its physicality through its tight contortion of material and the scattering shock of its black-and-white palette. The artwork at once charges out of and recedes into space, recreating the dislocating effect of the “dazzle” camouflage pattern used on American naval vessels in the early 20th Century and recalling Chamberlain’s own time in the Navy.