Looking at a Paul Wackers painting is a little like being handed the key to a very tasteful hoarder’s cabinet. His canvases crowd together anthropological oddities and objets d’art, where a shape borrowed from an ancient Greek amphora shares a shelf with a pop-graffitied candlestick. Jewel-like organic forms balance in impossible tension on the ledges that hold them. Wackers riffs on iconic styles, bending the biomorphic curves of Modernist sculptor Isamu Noguchi into what he cheerfully calls his own “knock-offs,” and salts his interiors with impossible objects based on real pieces he builds in the studio.
But Wackers is no armchair anthropologist. He’s usually in motion, out in the world with his dog Buddy, a rescue with a gallery-ready signature look, ears up and tongue lolling, that he deploys at art openings coast to coast. We caught up with the pair in New York, where Wackers’s new work was on view at the Jack Hanley Gallery.
A dog who logs road miles
Buddy is a seasoned traveler. By the time we spoke he was closing in on seven years old and had two cross-country road trips behind him, the first taken when he was only about seven months. Wackers admits the dog can be a touch reluctant to hop in the car at the outset, but the hesitation vanishes the moment the trip turns into camping or hiking. Then Buddy is all in.
When the two go backpacking, Buddy pulls his own weight, literally. He carries his own gear and pack, hauling his food, his snacks, and, importantly, his own waste back out. Wackers is a firm believer in leaving no trace, and has strong feelings about people who bag their dog’s poop only to abandon the bag on the trail. That, he points out, is not actually cleaning up.
From the shelter to the studio
Wackers adopted Buddy from Social Tees, a rescue based on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. He’s always been an animal person, he says, raised around dogs and cats, and from the moment he left home he wanted a companion of his own, a pal for adventures.
That gallery-ready poise didn’t come free. Wackers knew that raising a city dog solo would take work, and he put in years of it, committing early to exposing Buddy to a huge range of situations. He credits a little luck too, but mostly the payoff of patience: he’s learned to sense when Buddy is getting uncomfortable and to move them somewhere calmer before a problem can bloom.
The reward is a dog who comes to the studio every single day. Wackers jokes that Buddy has learned the choreography of his workday, that turning to face the “wall,” meaning a painting in progress, is the universal signal for nap time. Buddy has never caused trouble at the studio or at home; he sticks to his own toys and treats and stays out of anything he shouldn’t touch.
The occasional muse
Wackers takes inspiration from what surrounds him, so Buddy has slipped into a few paintings, usually tucked into a corner rather than front and center, and almost always asleep, because sleeping is what Buddy does the instant they arrive at the studio. Over the years Wackers has amassed a whole wall of dog art, much of it Buddy rendered in various studios and stops along their travels.
Asked whether he and his dog have grown to resemble each other, Wackers deflected with a grin, claiming their shared traits are mainly good looks and charm, then conceding he’d need an impartial witness to say for sure.
The dog who got him through
Then there’s the part that isn’t a joke. Living and working alone during the pandemic, Wackers says Buddy essentially saved him. For months the dog was his only real company and the one reason he had to get outside when the world felt unhinged. Buddy is attuned to the mood around him, Wackers says, and on the hard days he’d turn especially sweet. Wackers isn’t sure whether he’s projecting, but he’s certain he’s simply more at ease when Buddy is nearby.
He suspects his work absorbs all of this on a delay. An earlier show at the Eleanor Harwood Gallery circled the idea of space, how we hold onto it or let it collapse around us, a preoccupation he’s carried for a while. Lately, fresh off the road with Buddy, what’s feeding his paintings are the places, objects, and people the two of them saw along the way.
As for how the dog has enriched his life, Wackers didn’t bother with a tidy summary. Too many ways to name, he said. Buddy is his best pal, and he can’t picture life without him.
Paul Wackers’s work has been exhibited at the Jack Hanley Gallery in New York, where his show ran through August 5, 2022.
