Pavel Kraus' pseudo-mythic sculptural objects suggest a metaphysical interpretation, both Surrealist in its psychological ambiguity and associations, and post formal in their physicality and choice of materials, bringing this duality with an ironic indeterminacy. These objects' foreboding physicality, incongruously, smells like children. The organic bees was, natural fibers and wood leads toward the above mentioned descriptions.  

Pavel Kraus continues in "Sex, Death, Offerings/Levitation" his program of codified Arte Povera installations. Suggesting theatrically stylized cenotaphs, these objects convey minimalist dictates filtered through a lugubrious romanticism. Kraus’ increasingly cryptic symbolism registers as a moribund, ideological pathos where transcendent longing struggles with dystopian entropy.

Qualities of craft and intent are played against the arbitrary and the cliched, as these elegiac objects cite both surrealist non-sequiters and minimalist fact, producing metaphoric slippage which elicits both the object and the heroic.

Kraus’ constructions are not so much about suggested meaning as about submerging meaning in a material anxiety of significance. The objects perverse reluctance at specificity of identity/intent suggests an ironic detachment which keeps the work situated equally, and unresolvedly, between the sacred and the profane.

Joseph Karoly