Inside the brilliant and short career of Paul Thek: 'The goal was to live a creative existence as a maker – and he lived in a saint-like fashion'

The sun is beating down outside the window – it’s the kind of heat to bring out shades. It opens out into an overgrown garden where the undergrowth competes for space in hasty brushstrokes of strong emerald and pale purple. Further away from this chaos, the taller trees calmly blend into the white summer sky in blotches of lime green. Beyond waxy meat-filled Brillo boxes, the artist Paul Thek kept returning to looking at the world through windows and illustrate them in quick paintings – this was one he painted the year before he passed away from AIDS. Currently, it hangs in Thomas Dane Gallery in London, as part of an extensive exhibition of his paintings curated by the critic, writer and artist Kenny Schacter with the designer Jonathan Anderson. 'Paul had a little garden on his roof in his cheap East Village apartment,' said Schachter, 'And he drew flowers and buildings from his rooftop in a colour scheme that he himself related to Monet – even though he spelled him as M-o-n-e-y, poking fun at the value of art.'

Thek was bitter about the art world being exclusionary, said Schachter whose relationship with Thek’s work runs long from when he was seeing reproductions of his work until the first retrospective at Witte de With came along in Rotterdam in the mid-90s. In the initial years, Schachter was the only buyer in New York City of his work. 'The only thing worse than behind the times in the art world is to be far ahead,' he retorted, 'He was constantly facing adversity personally and professionally, but it never got in the way of his work – and that to me is one of the benchmarks against which I measure my own life.'

He’d even acquired one of the numerous sketchbooks maintained by Thek, which he finally brought himself to dismantle and exhibit as individual pages at Thomas Dane. When I caught him a couple of days after the opening, he had taken two sketchbook pages off the gallery walls and was carrying them around Spain. 'It’s very rare that you can not only live with an artwork but screwing your nose up against it on a regular basis for decades,' he said, pausing for a while when I asked him how the way he saw Thek has changed over the years, 'And still feel the same degree of intensity. I’ve been looking at these two sheets of paper, and you can see the pressure by the intensity of some of the lead markings of the pencil.'

Although paintings formed a significant chunk of Thek’s creative outputs, it remained a medium where his interest kept fluctuating in between his sculptural practice and more immersive installations. After returning from Documenta 5 to New York in 1972, he complained to his friend Franz Deckwitz in a letter, 'I am now here trying to do some paintings, some real paintings, oils on canvas, but it is hard so hard to get started again, the hardest thing I've ever done.' A few years later he wrote to him that it’d been months since he stopped painting. 'I have rather lost interest in it,' he wrote, 'And so I have taken a job here in a kind of supermarket.' Painting was also expensive for an artist who wasn’t really selling anything much during his lifetime, but Thek couldn’t care less about materials choosing to paint on newsprint. 'It’s the least regarded material that an artist would ever see fit to work with, so it had a conceptual import for him in terms of hierarchy of value,' noted Schachter.

Perhaps it was because he could be quite self-critical and strived for a severe form of perfectionism in his work. A true-to-nature verisimilitude, noted Schachter – whereas his paintings were sometimes hurried creations. 'At the same time – I only just read that in his writings today – he said that he has to accept that sometimes he works with very little precision or discipline,' he said, 'Sometimes you see him giving himself a little freedom to be more frivolous in his renderings. Those works have a great sincerity and whimsicalness like his self-portrait as a potato – which is a simple line drawing, almost like a cartoon. I’m drawn a lot more to some of these works.'

At the same time, Thek was an incredible draughtsman and for Schacter, one of the very few artists who almost harked back to Renaissance art in his convergence of thinking conceptually paired with his technical ability. 'He was very cognisant of art history – Jasper John or the more classical art of Cy Twombley,' explained Schachter, 'He was just restless and curious, always searching – an insatiable sponge absorbing everything good or bad that surrounded him, which became fodder for is works, which are very diaristic.' He painted a hammer and sickle sometimes – although there’s no signs of his views on Marxism so Schachter thinks it’s similar to Warhol’s ‘Mao’ upon Nixon visiting the Chairman. During his time in Europe, Thek was quite taken by Van Gogh – as at the end of the day, Gogh was a damn good painter, said Schachter – and bicycled around Amsterdam with his ears painted red. Gogh had created his own language to interpret the world around him, and Thek was developing his.

While looking around the gallery, it might seem Thek was following an impressionistic style with visible brushstrokes on canvas, where each layer of colour remained separate. Or sometimes deliberately returning to childlike caricature, scribbles of colour and a fascination with words in big fonts like in ‘Untitled (South America)’ – but there’s also works like ‘Farewell to Washington Square’ which was a self-portrait rendered in a completely different style almost in a modern day suspense comic book page format, where we are once again staring at the dark evening from the window where the blackness of dusk merges into this mysterious figure – Thek himself – with the only lights being the sparkling Twin Towers in the background. “He never really had a style,' said Schachter, 'He flitted back and forth between sculpture to more ephemeral, collaborative work. He was critiquing pop art and minimal art with the juxtaposition between the cold, clinical hard edge of the encasement filled with the exposed, vulnerable piece of flesh.'

Neither did he want to be only associated with his meat works, as the moment he heard himself being referenced to as the ‘meat man’ in art circles, he stopped. 'He’s not making products for a department store,' laughed Schachter, 'He’s making art to appease himself and like-minded people that responded. When he came back to New York and saw the shitty art of neo-expressionism that he didn’t rate very highly, he said, if people want bad art, I’ll give a taste of what they’re coveting – I’ll make a shitty painting.' He infused such works with humour as much as with childlike innocence, like in his self-portrait as a potato. 'He was very interested in a good-natured critique introducing humour as a disarming mechanism for people to relate to his work,' said Schachter.

For instance, Thek would use a plastic labelling machine to glue the titles of his paintings on faux frames, critiquing the formal mannerist 19^th century framing techniques with brass plaques of artwork details – which we are all familiar with. He hated the white light in galleries where people breezed in and out with short attention spans – instead he made a shift towards smaller works and hung them really low to the ground, adding children’s chairs for people to sit close to the paintings, a single light above the frame – still attached to some of the paintings at Thomas Dane – revealing the work slowly. 'Art is a slow burning process,' said Schachter, 'And he wanted to bring more attention to the act of looking.' The year before he passed, he wrote to Deckwitz about his show of paintings at Mokotoff Gallery where he switched off all the lights, except for the painting wall. 'It felt like water, like being IN a swimming pool!' he gushed. It was indeed very romantic, said Schachter.

It was very theatrical, the way he wanted his works to be seen and perhaps it’s expected from his preoccupation with theatre performing in 12-hour Abramović-like plays or as a member of a rock band in the ‘60s. Installations like what would become ‘A Work in Progress’ were live performative transformations of the museum into an artist’s studio. 'His collaborations were entirely theatrical – very participatory,' said Schachter, 'For him, art is not an isolated act by a lone actor or genius.' Even while he was working with tenets of Catholicism and ritual in his installations, he was going back to how religious rituals are actually interactions amongst groups of people.

Thek was also surrounded by writers like Susan Sontag or Tennessee Williams and writing was a significant part of his artistic practice, in sketchbooks or in paintings. How then, do we see Paul Thek the writer? 'I’m a writer and I make art,' smiled Schachter, 'And most of my visual work originates in my mind’s eye as the juxtaposition between words and images. Penmanship has an aesthetic quality to it, and Paul was very conscious of the illustrative qualities of his writing – sometimes he writes backwards, sometimes he writes in print. Titles of works are extreme and there’s puns almost like Duchamp.' Could he guess why he and Sontag might have fallen out? 'I think creative people are difficult,' said Schachter, 'He was a very famously, strong-willed artist and she was a strong-willed intellectual, so there’s gonna be come rift in the relationship – I doubt it was something was some significant schism. And she was instrumental in getting Robert Wilson to become the executor of his estate on his deathbed – he thought it was good for the market – which it was.'

Thek was critical of art world inequities, but his work was very much a celebration of life and Schachter needed to surround himself with such extraordinary efforts by an unsung artist, when he started collecting Thek. 'I couldn’t care who sung his praises,' he retorted. Anderson too avidly collects Thek – who interestingly, was designing textiles early in his career, whose evidence no longer remains, like some of his original artwork – and they had been speaking regarding the designer’s purchases for his private collection. Jonathan had told Wallpaper that the Paul Thek Whitney retrospective catalogue was on his reading list, along with Burroughs' ‘Queer’ a couple of years ago – both of which he's now worked on in some public project. Schachter likes collaborating with people from 'afar' he laughed. 'Now that the lead dealer who worked with the estate, Ted Bonin, has died, there’s very few people who would be considered specialists in Paul’s work and by default, I’m among them,' said Schachter, 'I chose some of Jonathan’s personal collection and Thomas Dane owned some works – Jonathan hung the show.'

Schachter isn’t a fashionista, he laughed. 'I wear the same clothes everyday,' he shrugged, 'I just know I was so moved by Thek’s work and I’m still learning about it 30 years later. The art market has grown more in the 25 years than in the previous 250 years, and nothing has changed. And he fought against it – most artist will make some compromise to the market, like Anish Kapoor makes these candy balls to be able to make these crazy installations and paintings, but Paul Thek never resorted to such a strategy in relationship to his own sustenance and he sacrificed a lot for it. The goal was to live a creative existence as a maker – and he lived this life in a saint-like fashion.'

Paul Thek: Seized by Joy is at Thomas Dane until 2 August