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Indepth Arts News:
"Paul Paiement: Hybrids 2.0.5"
2003-06-05 until 2003-06-05
Heather Marx Gallery
San Francisco, CA,
USA United States of America
Acting at once as a painter, scientist, and entomologist, highly regarded Los Angeles artist Paul Paiement creates a unique wonderland by combining common everyday consumer objects into an über-species of colorful bugs, butterflies, praying mantises, and more. Paiement’s new series of egg tempera on panel and watercolor on paper paintings will be on exhibit for the first time at Heather Marx Gallery June 5 – July 5, 2003
Paiement draws on the skill of a scientist to paint his perfectly formed species on panels that range from perfect circles and squares to isosceles triangles. Employing the age-old technique of egg tempera, Paiement is able to achieve a wonderful luster in his panel paintings. His day-glo species rest against pristine white backgrounds suggesting an entomologist’s gleaming examination table. Paiement skillfully plays with ideas of manipulation and mass production, whereby his subjects are split evenly in two as if wrapped around the panel itself, or replicated numerous times in a varied palette of colors. The effect is quite playful, yet thought-provoking; in a time when the science of cloning, and the constant desire to make people, animals, and goods faster and better has reached a fever pitch, these paintings may also read as subversive. Despite being made up of lively colors and amusing gadgets, these “bugs” caution us that we too are increasingly subject to such exploitation.
Paiement has shown widely over the past ten years in solo and group shows in New York, Italy, the Netherlands, Canada, London, Chicago, and extensively in Southern California. His work was most recently featured at the Irvine Fine Arts Center in Irvine, CA; in the international traveling exhibition Miniature in London and Tokyo; and in the important exhibition Cyborg Manifesto or The Joy of Artifice at the Laguna Art Museum in Laguna Beach, CA.
Paiement’s work has been featured in several publications including Art in America, Artscene, Modern Painters, Artforum, The Los Angeles Times, and the New Art Examiner. Paiement received his MFA from the University of Southern California in 1995.
IMAGE:
Paul Paiement
Hybrids F - Hymenoptera Videocamerae
20" x 17", egg tempera on panel, 2002
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