Julian Pace

We talk a lot about luck in our lives, whether we even think the concept exists. We claim to be unlucky when the world doesn’t tip in our favor, consider ourselves lucky if at the right place and right time, life changes in a fortuitous instant. I don’t know if I quite believe in luck, but I believe being open to change presents and provides wonderful opportunities that can guide us. That is why I like speaking with Julian Pace.

 

Julian is the first person I’ve encountered whose life was changed in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. How brilliantly perfect to hear that, mid-pandemic, an artist without a major solo show on his resume would be driving cross-country from NYC to Seattle and would get a text message from an influential Los Angeles-based art curator inviting him to a residency that would, indeed, change the course of his life. The body of work made at The Cabin in 2020 has thrust Pace into a conversation about a new generation of American painters who look at iconography in surprising, often imposing and joyous ways. In an era where we were left to find meaning in what was and what will be, Pace has the imagination and skill to show how celebrity and cultural icons shape our subconscious to portray a singular, gigantic vision of the world we have made for ourselves, allowing these celebrities to take on a larger life of their own and impose their will on our collective conscious.

 

I found it fascinating that Pace grew up in Italy and returned to Florence in his twenties, a city considered a living museum for five hundred years and counting, populated by classic religious symbols and historical cultural stories. How interesting that, engulfed in this history of painting icons, Pace began to draw his interpretation, not by fashioning some form of magical realism, but in a particularly fresh take on the most famous people of our times. On the eve of his solo show at Simchowitz Gallery in Los Angeles, I visited Pace in his studio to talk about how directly oppositional his pieces are to the iconic great works, how he initially found himself in LA and the way that luck played a part in his now breakthrough career.

Julian Pace: I paint people and I think I treat them the same. I think I'm more interested in people. I don't know exactly. It's where I go in my head. I think I'm more interested in the human form and the people rather than who they are necessarily. It's very random sometimes.

 

Not really? That would be an interesting angle. I mean, I did have posters, but it wasn't one of those walls that's plastered in them. But I can see how that would reflect in my work, that I would have a lot of pop-culture or sports icons in my room. 

 

I think when it comes to the more iconic people or the more famous people, it just comes from what interests me at the time; for example, the Michael Jackson work for my show in LA at Simchowitz Gallery. I was listening to random music, and Michael Jackson came on, and I hadn't heard it in years. So I started listening to Michael Jackson for a week straight and then wanted to do Michael Jackson paintings. The original plan was to do, and I'm still going to, four Michael Jacksons, from each stage of his career, so he gets more fucked up. So, from Thriller, it’ll go to Scream or on to Bad, and so on. I was studying his form. Recently, I was reading all this stuff and watching documentaries about NASA, so I did John Glenn. It's pretty much just that. I'm really into history. I'm really into art history, into culture and nostalgia. I think it's huge. Nostalgia is big.

 

I think so, because the world feels so shitty. Everyone's like, “Oh, remember back in the day when I could do this or that…” I think it's just personal for me. Even the soccer players, I don't even care about sports, really…

Exactly, exactly. He's a cultural icon.

 

Famous images, exactly. And I like to place two famous people next to each other so it makes people wonder a little bit, like, "Why did you put those two next to each other?” There’s Kendall Jenner with her iPhone next to John Glenn. It’s sort of how we accumulate and navigate culture, isn’t it? 

 

Oh, big time. When I was there, I wasn't doing so much art, though I made art throughout my whole life. I was into drawing and I was, say,  the artist in my family, but I stopped for a while. After high school, I did a year of community college and I took a drawing class there, and then I left school and I moved back to Italy. When I was a kid, I don't remember, I was there until I was like four. When I went back, living there for about six years, at that time, about halfway through, I started drawing again.

 

Yes, I keep all of them. It’s weird about Italy and the Renaissance art, because I feel like you get numb to it, or at least I did. Because everything... the art is everywhere. Sculptures, paintings, buildings, everything, everything. It's like you live in a museum in Florence. I lived in Florence.

 

The city is actually a museum! I don't know, people are, like, "Oh, it's so beautiful." But for me, I don't even like Renaissance art. I like the themes. I like the concepts and the themes, but just the style, it got old. I don't know, maybe I'm just cynical. I just find it like, "Ugh, it's annoying."

Absolutely.

 

Oh, absolutely. It's like our royalty, the people I’m painting. Like the Jenner paintings, I don't really give a shit about the Jenners. I don't hate on them, but the celebrity worship thing is interesting. It’s something that I despise in a way, but I still paint just because I think it's just impossible to ignore.

 

It's just a way for me to explore the human form. You know what I mean? With these iconic figures, I'm doing that really a lot better now. Now I use these forms to explore in color and abstraction and all that, and of course, using different materials.

 

And I don't want it to be too serious. That's why I've done Mona Lisa’s and different things like that. I do it in my own remix way, just modernizing. I do like that idea of tradition and modernism together. I'm very much about that. I take what I do seriously, but I don't really take myself that seriously. I like to put in a little bit of, I don't know, not seriousness.

 

Yeah, it's fun. The way I started doing these big, beefed up shoulders was from a joke. A friend of mine saw a painting I did of Dennis Rodman. And he says, “Ah, look at his little baby bird shoulders.” He's making fun because he had these little weak shoulders. So I just did one that was blown up. I think next I did Shawn Kemp, who played for the Sonics and is a legend in Seattle. So I did the big puffed up shoulders on him, too. Something clicked there and I thought that was something really interesting. I just pursued that. 

 

They're much more imposing. It's why I started to expand. That's why I think it was such a breakthrough to start, to be able to work bigger. When I came to LA, I had a space in this residency, this big garage studio, and so I was able to do bigger works.

 

Yea, the La Brea residency at The Cabin with Danny First.

 

That was huge, because I could blow up. Go bigger. So Danny brought me to LA. I wouldn't be here without him. Basically, to be able to do them bigger, I think, was the breakthrough.  Like you said, they're more imposing, gigantic statues, you know what I mean? Especially with the iconic figures, it turns them into these colossal Greek and Egyptian behemoths.

 

I was ready. When I got here, I had no idea even what a residency was. I was bartending in New York, pre-Covid, and I just left bartending to go full-time at the other job where I was working. It was an operations job for this Italian menswear company, one of many jobs I didn't like. I just had to pay the bills, right.

 

I was painting on the side. I would bartend until five in the morning, get home, whether I took the train or whatever, get home around six-thirty and I'd try and paint for a couple hours—then I'd go to sleep. Repeat. Just a little bit in my room, blah, blah, blah. So anyways, whatever, that's what I was doing in New York and then I got fired because of Covid and that's… 

 

The best layoff, the best thing ever, because I was able to paint full-time, but still in my bedroom. As luck would have it, I was driving across the country from New York to Seattle, to my brother's wedding. When I was in South Dakota, I think it was Sioux Falls, Danny first sent me a message on Instagram. I think he saw my paintings from some little art account that shared some stuff, a small account and random, but that’s how it works now, right? 

 

He sent a message and we went back and forth for a couple weeks, and then he invited me to come down to do his residency. That's how I got here. And I don't know if it was one painting that changed my trajectory, but all I know was that I was ready to go because this is my first art thing. Like, fuck, this is crazy. Like I said, I didn't know what a residency exactly was. Everyone in my family was, like, "Who the hell is this guy? He just wants you to come down there and paint? He's going to give you a free place to stay and paint? That's kind of weird, right?" No one in my family knows anything about this kind of stuff.

It's weird! But if you know what a residency is, and Danny First is a known person. He had Amoako Boafo, he had Tschabalala Self in his residency. I thought, "All right, fuck it." I drove down and I think because I had these ideas ready, because I do everything in these sketchbooks, I just was able to go boom, boom, boom and be able to paint big, like I'd never painted before.

 

Yeah, it did! I love South Dakota. It changed everything. Then through Danny First, I met Stefan Simchowitz who then really kicked it into the next gear. It's been amazing. Everything changed.

 

If I think about it too much it makes me anxious, I'll be walking down the street sometimes and I just think, "Oh yeah, I live in LA." It's weird, but I just go with it. I don't try and think of it as anything different. Even the show I have coming up; I had a show at Danny's residency at The Cabin, but there was no opening. It was still Covid, so people weren’t coming in. I didn’t have to worry about either. This opening at Simchowitz I’m about to have, though, it's like, "Oh shit, people are going to come to this?!"

 

It's weird! But if you know what a residency is, and Danny First is a known person. He had Amoako Boafo, he had Tschabalala Self in his residency. I thought, "All right, fuck it." I drove down and I think because I had these ideas ready, because I do everything in these sketchbooks, I just was able to go boom, boom, boom and be able to paint big, like I'd never painted before.

 

I realized that was what I wanted to do. Maybe it shows you what you would do in your free time. If you have all this free time, what are you going to do with yourself? Some people are going to maybe do nothing. I just was able to ramp up the art. I was able to just give all my focus to it. I think that if you saw the work that I was doing a year ago compared to now, I've grown; not to toot my own horn, but I've grown exponentially just for the fact that I was able to just dedicate all my time to it.

 

Yeah, a hundred percent. No, it's exactly what it is. There's these cliches, and then there's the 10,000 hours, whatever, but it's real as fuck. Absolutely. I'm here every day, and if I'm not here, I'm in here, in this. I'm always working and also never working. It's kind of crazy. It's that cliche of… I don't think it's, “find something you love and you never work a day in your life.” Not every single day am I like, "Oh, this is such a joy to do this, what I love." It's not that, but it's something that I actually care about and am passionate about. This is the first time in my life I've had something where I really felt like this was my shit. I make big life decisions around this. Before, I was a preschool teacher, a tour guide, a bartender, I went through all stages. It was not serving me anymore—whatever; move on to the next thing. It wasn't important for me.

 

I recently read a Chuck Close quote where he said that inspiration is bullshit. Have you ever heard that quote? I am so of that school. I think that inspiration is definitely real, but if you just sit around waiting for inspiration, it's not going to happen. You have to do it, just do it, do it. I think it was 2016, basically, when I started painting every single day. That's what it takes, I think. I had to just do that, and so I got better. Luckily, this person randomly saw me. And what is luck?  Don’t they say “preparation and timing?” It’s very true. If I wasn't at the place where I was when this guy Danny reached out, I would have been like, "Oh no, that's weird. I don't know what that is," but I had never been more ready in my life for this to happen.