Jacopo Pagin's 'Office Illusions' Take Over Make Room Los Angeles
Grieving the dreams and aspirations of a bygone corporate era.
Make Room Los Angeles is presenting Office Illusions by Jacopo Pagin, on view now through December 17, 2024, marking the artist’s second solo show with the gallery. Blurring the lines between myth and reality, Pagin explores the turn of the millennium, shaped by a seductive vision of endless progress and control.
In his series of large-scale paintings, the artist immerses viewers in distorted office landscapes filled with desks, computers and pens. Stark and sterile, these reimagined artifacts reflect the shiny allure of corporate power that consumed the 1990s and early 2000s, while sending a flare from a future where the prospects of success and stability have become increasingly hollow.
Banal furniture plays a central role in the exhibition. Across the gallery space, an installation of black office chairs invites viewers to scoot and roll between the paintings. A totem of power and irony, the chair becomes a literal and symbolic vehicle, traversing through the contradictions and disconnection inherent to work, finance and the corporate ladder.
“The impersonal aesthetics—familiar and nostalgic—evoke a collective remembrance of foreseeing a bright future that we now recognize as inconsistent, rhetorical and speculative, favoring one-sided power. By traversing the ghostly remnants of recent cultural history, Pagin urges us to confront the illusory nature of progress and the limits of our constructed narratives,” the gallery describes in a statement.
Make Room Los Angeles
6361 Waring Ave,
Los Angeles, CA 90038
