I’ve seen the works of Paul Paiement on more than a few occasions—in large commercial galleries, hip alternative venues, and a few noted museums. For almost a decade, Paiement’s NEXUS series, which he’s been developing and exhibiting in numbered variants (1.0, 2.0, etc.), has intrigued me. It’s a unique crossbreed of machine-made rectilinear relief sculpture and meticulous, hand-rendered, ultra-realistic landscape painting. As I slowly look around the room at Paiement’s “NEXUS 2.0.1” at Ethan Cohen Gallery and compare the show with my past experiences in the artist’s wondrous will-meets-wilderness worlds, I conclude that these works are among his very best.
The thirteen acrylic-on-wood-panel pieces in his new exhibition—created from Paiement’s cross-country outdoor painting excursions—touch on some sweeping subjects. With poetry and poise, the artist’s NEXUS works offer a view of the integration and the reconciliation of practical, high-tech, architectural human inventions with our boundless natural environment. To some, concrete cubes intended to contain humans are an obvious violation of the organic landscape in which they reside. However, exploring—and not decrying—that symbiotic relationship is of paramount interest to the artist. “Today, it’s clear that every inch of our planet has been mapped and charted by everyone—from residential housing developers to solar farmers,” Paiement explains. “While it sounds daunting to some, I don’t place judgment on it.”
It’s hard to suspend that judgment Paiement speaks of while immersed in the pervasive violation of nature I routinely see in urban centers—from skyscraping smokestacks to earth-burrowing subways. But the artist’s work inspires me to consciously try and arrest my assumptions about this dynamic while looking at, for example, the handsomely painted surface on Nexus—Glendale, Nevada, from 2023. It’s a sizable piece among those in the artist’s oeuvre and one of the showstoppers. The gorgeous brown grain lines in the work’s sanded maple plywood base are reiterated by the warm sedimentary layers of the desert floor in an overlaid image. As my eyes travel around the perimeter of the painted portion of the piece, I see an outline of a few tall building tops, and when I look below, I see a flopped image of that same outline, as if reflected in
Interestingly, those pronounced, geometric, human-made shapes are punctuated by jutting, steely gray mountain crests that nearly match the hue of cement city structures and sidewalks. This co-mingling of features reminds me how likely it is that a towering downtown office park could plop down in those pristine sands one day, given the real pace of human expansion—despite what we now know about the effect of development on the planet. But it also suggests the design cues we take from such natural forms that inspire our techniques for erecting shelters—which may ensure our survival in a compromised climate. The curvy sagebrush and rusty rubble swath in the center of the work give me a vibrant flash of what I imagine are the artist’s plein-air painting adventure memories, adroitly providing necessary relief from the dreary monochrome, the prosaic phantom of what may come.
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Another striking piece in the show is Paiement’s Nexus—Gunnison, Colorado, made in 2016. From a couple of yards back, it is a masterwork of black-and-white photorealism, featuring a few sun-dappled, quaking aspen trees that stand tall in the background and foreground among regional bushes and grain grasses. The rolling clouds above make it easy to imagine a faint wind blowing across the plains and hills beyond. In the work’s center sits a silhouette of a modernist building. Tan and opaque, it’s replete with open windows and features a single walkway extending toward the viewer. As I move up close to the piece, I see meaty brushstrokes that reveal the artist’s deft—and very human—hand. Faint green and yellow translucent Plexiglass cutouts, which overlay nearly the entire work, are almost like close-up alternative views of the same central structure.
As the austere lines of these ghost buildings frame my view of the landscape near and far, I can’t help but think of master modern architect Mies van der Rohe’s quote about his famed residential project, “When one looks at nature through the glass walls of the Farnsworth House, it takes on a deeper significance than when one stands outside. More of nature is thus expressed—it becomes a greater part of the whole.” Paiement similarly offers a lens that creates both contrast and continuity, a balance that ultimately gives me a more complete understanding, acceptance and appreciation of the nature that we are all a part of—even when it feels as if I’m grossly separated from it while living in the city.
New and ongoing technology often creates complex, beyond-duality relationships between human needs and our environment. I think back to Paiement’s earlier mention of maps and charts. Sometimes our extensive mapping anticipates the building of resource-consuming but necessary tract homes. Yet we also map out parcels of land needed to set up acres of solar panels for the generation of renewable energy. Perhaps this is Paiement’s challenge for us—the act of envisioning, mapping and ultimately, making suggests that we are all creators of the world––that both the bird who builds a nest and the architect who designs a building are animals following their creative instincts. Regardless of the outcome, we must face that we are an integral aspect of the evolutionary process.
Through the juxtapositions evident in all his work, Paiement helps us to reconsider our impulse to create and our relationship with nature—reversing the common notion that humans routinely resist or only devastate their environment. Paiement’s unpeopled worlds remind us that, as our global population continues to expand into and incorporate untrodden open spaces, the instinct to develop, build and create is itself natural and animalistic. My hope is that we recognize the massive responsibility that comes with these creative impulses and abilities—and find sustainable ways to be a “greater part of the whole.”
“NEXUS 2.0.1: Contemporary Landscape Paintings by Paul Paiement” is at Ethan Cohen Gallery through November 22.
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