Of all the artists in Toronto of his generation, Paul P. would have been my last guess to eventually go multimedia. His delicate watercolours, ink drawings, and oil paintings of beautiful and perhaps doomed young men seemed the be-all and end-all of his oeuvre (which is not to say it didn’t get taken up by other artists such as Kris Knight and an unnamed adolescent from a high school art show I browsed last year). However, his new exhibition at Scrap Metal Gallery– his first local solo appearance in almost a decade – is a reminder that he was barely out of his twenties when we last saw him and an admonition that the underlying concerns in his work can manifest themselves in different forms.
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Paul P., Civilization Coordinates, 2015, installation view (courtesy: Paul P. & Scrap Metal)
That said, don’t visit the gallery and expect video installations and computer terminals from this artist of the old school. Rather than fetishizing technology, he crosses disciplines in a manner akin to the predecessors with which he finds a “consanguinity of temperament” (his words from his insightful exhibition text) and expands his practice into the fields of furniture design and rug making. There remain a couple oil paintings of the inscrutable portraits with which we are familiar, but these serve only as a gateway to more elliptical evocations of place before ending up in abstraction and a striking monochrome in blue. The two patterned rugs laid out on low plinths are equally hard to place and allude less to any particular content and more to a distinct sensibility.
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Paul P., Untitled, 2015, oil on linen (courtesy: Paul P. & Scrap Metal)
That sensibility is distilled in the finely crafted furniture that is far too fragile for its functional purposes and instead stands in for the figures it is dedicated to – most notably the wartime English novelist Nancy Mitford. She is the key to P.’s shift from a post-Stonewall, pre-AIDS heyday of gay culture to the post-WWI, pre-WWII artistic renaissance in Europe. To complete this historical portrait, he has also designed mahogany shelves for the gallery and stocked them with a selection of books by or sympathetic to the writers and artists who’ve inspired him.
In the absence of a library to house the things he’s built and linger over the literature he’s absorbed, I dove deep into the internet and lost myself in literary figures previous unknown to me. If there is any recourse to new media in this work, it’s the gift of the world wide web to bring to light the mislaid eras and forgotten artists who have fallen out of fashion and out of print but are newly retrievable via the wonder of our generation’s wireless and the ease with which it brings all history to the present. In an interview from 2007, P. says, “I try to avoid nostalgia,” and despite the unlikeliness of this coming from an artist so tied to the past, I think he’s sincere and that’s what makes this work contemporary.
Scrap Metal Gallery: http://www.scrapmetalgallery.com/
Paul P.: Civilization Coordinates continues until February 13.
Terence Dick is a freelance writer living in Toronto. His art criticism has appeared in Canadian Art, BorderCrossings, Prefix Photo, Camera Austria, Fuse, Mix, C Magazine, Azure, and The Globe and Mail. He is the editor of Akimblog. You can follow his quickie reviews and art news announcements on Twitter @TerenceDick.
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Paul P. at Scrap Metal Gallery, Toronto
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