Paul Rousso “The Week Ahead”

Cheryl Hazan Gallery

poster for Paul Rousso “The Week Ahead”

This event has ended.

Paul Rousso’s dimensional shape shifting began over 35 years ago. As a young artist in Berkeley, he was often exposed to artists such as Roy Lichtenstein, Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, Dan Flavin, and Claes Oldenburg and artwork that emphasized the flat two-dimensional picture plane, such as Cubism. When he read Tom Wolfe’s The Painted Word, it convinced him something was missing in the art he was experiencing. Since then he has contemplated and experimented with the duality between two and three dimensions and abstract vs figurative, concepts that are still at the core of his work.

The Week Ahead, Paul Rousso’s first solo exhibition at Cheryl Hazan Contemporary Art, includes two new series, both on folded and manipulated acrylic panel. One portrays sheets of crumpled up New York Times, specifically from The Week Ahead section. The other series consists of molded and painted Plexiglas with pearlescent reflections and soft folds that, although devoid of imagery, can conjure a figurative presence.

Rousso believes that it is only a matter of time until newspapers and other paper objects such as currency, advertisements, and candy wrappers are a thing of the past. These works critique the handling of these objects, ranging from reducing waste and financial dependency. The enlarged scale of the crumpled up paper objects portrays their anticipated monumentality to documents that existed at one point in time. His abstract work extracts the essence of the concepts he is working with. It began in 2013 when he was working on his City Paper series; he bent up a piece of black painted Plexiglas to do a collage on, seeing the raw form of the folded plastic inspired him to delve deeper into the forms and materials he had been working with and focus on aspects of his process.

Time and temperature are two important factors in Rousso’s process. He has designed a giant oven made specifically to heat the acrylic pieces (after he has painted or printed directly on the surfaces). Once the Plexi is heated to the right temperature, he has a limited amount of time to push and fold the material into the desired form. With the abstract pieces the surface is also a bit more particular, so he is only able to rework to a certain extent.

Rousso explores the illusion of form and paint and printed matter through the subject of paper with the material of plastic and paint. He states “My work explores the relationship between the two-dimensional politics of the printed page and the multimedia promise of future-enhanced life experiences.”

Media

Schedule

from April 09, 2015 to May 09, 2015

Opening Reception on 2015-04-09 from 18:00 to 20:00

Artist(s)

Paul Rousso

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