Starting over a decade ago, JP Paul created a series of mixed-media works featuring diverse story-driven artworks that were simultaneously inquisitive, thought-provoking, and occasionally disturbing. Partial human bodies were reduced to forms and intertwined with other elements, including plants, flowers, pots, vases, bottles, animals, and sculpture plinths that served multiple purposes beyond their principal representation.
"Challenging Perceptions" joins “Compromised” along with “Indigo”, “20/20”, “Challenging Fate”, and “Screens” as the most important period of JP Paul's artistic output to date.
After several years when JP Paul explored organic materials and processes featured in purely abstract paintings and non-representational mark-marking studies, a return to writing and editing in 2019 brought with it a desire to further explore some of the original stories and statements initiated in the previous series mentioned.
"Challenging Perceptions" continues JP Paul’s studies the effects of variable perceptions, both positive and negative, as they relate to human beings struggling to take back control of their own lives in the face of social and political pressure on the freedoms, liberties, the rights of woman, minorities, identity politics, struggling families, and immigrants. Identity takes center stage both contextually and visually as many of these abstractions feature dichotomies represented by visual chasms and contradictions between beauty and pain, power and fragility, and strength versus submission. The artist has given himself a wide berth for this series in terms of content messaging as well as the employment of diverse materials and techniques. Perhaps this explains the depth and breadth of a series that is already the artist's largest and most profound to date.
JP Paul has straddled the line between analog and digital techniques since his early days as a photojournalist when he actively explored alternative photographic processes in both his physical B&W/Cibachrome darkroom and the early years of digital editing. "Challenging Perceptions" epitomizes the artist's desire to harmonize all of the above once again.
Canvasses are primed and layered with combinations of everything from thick acrylic gels and tinted paint to partially erased carbon markings, smudges, watercolor washes, and paint-thinner staining to maintain transparency. Images can be partially printed on the artist’s in-house printers while others are spot silkscreened or transferred via gel or acetone, all depending on the effects sought. Some elements, such as the flowers, are scanned live on in-house scanners before transferring the image to the canvas, while others are represented by mere color smudges.
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We invite galleries or regional art professionals to enquire about representation of JP Paul in your area.
(Excerpts originally published @ Artfronts.com)