Paul P. Blue And Opal

Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac is pleased to announce an exhibition of new works by the Canadian artist Paul P.

The artist's work was first shown in Salzburg in « Heavenly Creatures », a group exhibition curated by Lisa Ruyter in 2004. This is Paul P.'s second solo show in Austria following "In the Shadow of Young Girls in Bloom" at Galerie Lisa Ruyter, Vienna, 2004.

Titled "Blue and Opal" this exhibition of oil paintings and watercolours continues the artist's interest in Whistlerian colour combinations and atmospheres. Each are pictures of young men set against blue and opalescent backgrounds, who appear sometimes as head and shoulders portraits, and in other works as figures lost amidst murky landscape or shadowy interiors. This exhibition is defined beyond it's colour harmonies by it's combination of bucolic images, for example the watercolours depicting a solitary lute player in a field under a turbulent sky, alongside other pictures set in dim and intimate interiors. The movement towards smaller scale, low-keyed, almost classical nudes in landscape, is also notable in this exhibition. The glazed and jewel-toned works balance careful attention to the subject's likeness with moody, impressionistic representations of the figures and their environment. At times languishing, weary, wistful or distant, the work employs the aesthetic vocabulary of belle époque painting to lend a highly evocative yet nonchalant quality to the subjects that belies their origins as models sourced from erotic magazines from the late 1960s to the early 1980s.

"The boys in his pictures(…)were at their post-adolescent peak just before another sort of fin de siècle - the anything-goes era that ended abruptly with the coming of AIDS(…). Taken out of context, these boys become emblems - not of innocence, perhaps(…)but of liberation or, perhaps, sweet abandon. P. zeroes in on faces that capture their time and transcend it, faces that express something deeper than the usual crude leer."

"His work conflates memory, ecstasy and loss, adolescence and decadence, ripe beauty and its inevitable rot. His drawings are deft and precise, but they're not cool, not detached, not modern. Instead, they're discreetly, seductively romantic, at once restrained and voluptuous (…)".
Vince Aletti, The Yellow Room

Paul P.'s recent solo exhibitions include: 'Les pas effaces', Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Paris, with a special project 'Grey and Gold' with the gallery at Artforum, Berlin, both 2005; 'The Yellow Room', Marc Selwyn Fine Art, Los Angles, 2006; 'A Grey Note', Gallery Side 2, Tokyo, 2005, and 'Last Flowers' Daniel Reich Gallery, New York, 2003. His works has been included in many group shows including Mary Boone Gallery, New York ; David Zwirner Gallery, New York ; The Power Plant, Toronto and the Museo d'Arte Contemporanea Donnaregina, Naples. The artist's first comprehensive monograph, published by Powerhouse Books, New York will be released in spring 2007. Paul P.'s work is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, NY and other public collections.