James Paradis: Meditation on Form and Gesture
Jane Deering Gallery • Gloucester, MA • janedeeringgallery.com • Through July 31, 2021
James Paradis proves that abstract painting is alive and well—and not always two dimensional. Paradis’s solo show at the Jane Deering Gallery in Gloucester captures an art career that began relatively late in life—Paradis completed his BFA at Mass College of Art in his early 70s—yet his work reflects a fully realized aesthetic that spans the nearly two decades since. Paradis’s works strike both gestural and meditative notes (as the exhibition title suggests) while affirming something deeply primal about the way humans communicate through image.
As is often the case with art, Paradis’s sculptured paintings were initially the result of an accident: a frustrated moment in the studio that resulted in a balled-up sheet of paper unfurled and push-pinned to the wall, its newly revealed contours revealing other possibilities. Paradis pursued this “shaped canvas” approach to fruitful ends while continuing to explore the flat canvas.
Among the more sensual of the shaped works is Cloud 9 (2016, oil on sculptured canvas), a curvaceous and yes, as the name suggests, billowing, even undulating, sculptured painting. The piece simultaneously conjures marshmallows, rumpled bed sheets, and, of course, clouds. Its white hues are both subtle and complex with the emergent contours and shadows adding even more depth. A nearly indiscernible light blue seems to whisper from beneath to suggest clouds floating in the sky, viewed from an airplane window looking down. Paradis’s flat canvases are also, in many cases, nearly monochromatic, yet stop short of color field; and many of the paintings are textured, moving into space as if reaching out to the sculptured works. In both cases, abstraction dances with image: figures, walls, faces; water, sky, earth.
There’s gesture, there’s color, and there’s three-dimensionality, in all cases paying homage—whether to a single color (say yellow, blue, or green) or aesthetic idea, and always conveying a delightful ephemerality: A face emerging from an amber-hued color field, a ghost-like apparition in the shadows of a wall, an ocean with primordial beginnings foreshadowed in tiny points of light. As Paradis puts it, “for out of nothing rebirth and renewal happens.”
—Julianna Thibodeaux