Just Plein Realism
Paul Paiement paints in the open air in the great American west, Hilary Pecis in the sunlit yards and floral shops of Southern California. Paiement returns to a studied realism for an age that has seen it all come apart. Pecis may remind you more of pattern painting and the comforts of home.
Which is closest to the promise of landscape painting and a bicoastal art world? I bring this on Paiement together with my recent report on Pecis as a longer review and my latest upload.
Paiement is a plein air painter, and you know what that means. Such an artist works on the spot, for the freshness of the afternoon, the freshest of impressions, and, tradition has it, the freest of brushwork. He is also a photorealist, for crisp, glistening, painstaking surfaces that record every detail and thrust it in your face. And then he is a trompe l’oeil painter, who can fool you into taking collage for paint and painting for the thing itself. If that seems a lot to handle, he keeps finding new ways to say “you are there”—and dares you to tell one from another. The labels can come later, if they apply at all, at Ethan Cohen through November 23.
Of course, those things cannot all be true at once, not for the most marvelous of painters. Paiement is not taking advantage of a glorious afternoon to take you up the Seine with Claude Monet and a boatload of the French middle class. Nor does he leave anything about the handling of his brush to chance. But Paiement does work outdoors, in the sun-baked American west. Impressionism led directly to the uncanny precision of Georges Seurat and Pointillism, but not even he would go there. If that sounds a bit forbidding for all its familiar glory, Paiement is all about bringing you close and standing apart.
He could be measuring out the distance. Where photorealism tends to mean portraits, including nude portraits, he has no obvious signs of life—not so much as the shadow of the artist or the feet of his easel. And where trompe l’oeil means still life, this is still landscape, and titles specify the location. It looks like collage all the same. Paiement paints on wood panels, leaving much of the grain exposed. He layers plywood strips and Plexiglas patches on top.
At any rate, I think so, because he can indeed fool the eye. One might mistake the painted areas for prints, torn freely and mounted on wood. Their edges look that dark and real. Even now I probably underestimate just how much is a single field of paint. 
Nor can I say for sure when clear Plexiglas allows a cloudy look at the surface and when Paiement continues to paint over the Plexiglas. Nature and handiwork come together.
Ultimately, he is painting, building an image of intense sunlight and measured shadows. Distant hills fade into the haze of saturated color, leaving that much more to move forward into the picture plane. The cloudiness of Plexiglas could be part of that haze. The wood grain in unpainted areas can seem part of the scene itself—or the same scene in a different season or under a different light. It is palpable but visual. It just may not be what you expect.
Paiement has worked closer to home, but always in sunlight. Past work in his “Nexus” series has included offices and industry in its imagery and architecture. Nature’s pillars in his new work look almost manmade as well. Still, that kind of architecture is notoriously distancing. It is hard to imagine living in his work or escaping it. Painting has its illusions, its categories, and its myths.
Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.