NYAB Event - Paul DeMuro "Revelations"

Paul DeMuro "Revelations"

Zürcher Gallery

This event has ended.

By the sole means of painting, Paul DeMuro’s art exerts a real fascination. The eye is drawn into a heterogeneous space that forms a "screen" to representation: images of screens referring only to themselves; bright images composed of empty screens. But the emptiness is constructed in depth. And the light originates in the depth of the painting itself. This quasi-sculptural addition of relief inevitably recalls Rauschenberg’s Combine Paintings; but here the heterogeneous elements are absent, because the painting itself, in the paradoxical exercise of representation without object, works visually as a mirror; and the painted framing emphasizes this. Inscribed in the picture, it induces a false perspective. Here, painting attains its most tactile dimension, which at times is explicitly reinforced by shapes of hands.These "negative" hands of prehistoric paintings remind me also the one enclosed in a rayograph by Man Ray The Kiss (1922). But if a picture by DeMuro were to be compared to a mirror, it would be the Grimm brothers’ "magic" version – a two-way mirror whose particularity is to reflect only some of the light it receives, and to let the rest through, marking the separation of an incident ray into two beams, one reflected, the other refracted. It is through traces of such incidences and refractions that DeMuro reveals a mysterious connection with the intimacy behind the screen – that of the computer or the iPhone. This is a schema that he puts in correspondence with an app based on the principle of inverting the photographic image. According to John Yau: "Hearts, cupids, rainbows and hands - DeMuro incorporates visual clichés into his work, but he never becomes sentimental, kitschy or ironic. This is just one of the remarkable things about his work. His precise synthesis of the tactile and the optical is another. It’s as if he wishes that computers would manifest themselves physically, becoming something more than a screen we both touch and take for granted. [1] Through an intuitive use of color in relief, he seeks to place "the human relation" in a nexus with the machine : "Would it not be hard to imagine the day when a program will arrive that makes your posts, pics, tweets, likes, etc. into a repeating algorithm, thus making your personality, persona and identity go on into the foreseeable future, long after your body dies and rots away ?" Bernard Zürcher

Paul DeMuro (born 1981, he lives in Brooklyn, NY) was raised in Philadelphia. He received his MFA in Painting from Rutgers University in 2010. He obtains the Purchase Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He currently holds a Chashama studio residency in New York.
Selected exhibitions : 2012 Revelations*, Zürcher Studio, New York, NY ; Techno Nature, Zürcher Studio, New York, NY ; Broken Window Plane, Tracy Williams ltd, New York, NY ; Rutgers MFA Open Studios, Mason Gross*, New Brunswick, NJ ; Mythografia, Bull and Ram, New York, NY – 2011 Bleach (with Alex da Corte), Jolie Laide, Philadelphia, PA ; In Between the Sheets, Harlem Workspace Gallery, New York, NY ; Exprist, Columbia University, New York, NY – 2010 De-Nature, Jolie Laide, Philadelphia, PA ; Off The Map, White Box, New York, NY.
*solo exhibitions

[Image: Paul DeMuro "Individual God Identity" (2012) oil on canvas 112 x 91 in. © Adam Reich]