“NY Times Arts with Cat” (mixed media wall sculpture), in Paul Rousso’s show through June 27 at Lanoue Gallery, Boston.
The gallery reports:
“The ink and paper era is drawing to a close. ‘All this stuff,’ as artist Paul Rousso puts it, ‘is going away.’ That ‘stuff’ is no less than the paper-based underpinnings of modern civilization. Texts, images, sheet music, currency – the paper document is being displaced by its transformation into so many bits of binary code, digitized for the screen and everyplace at once. Yet paper documents are themselves an expression of something else entirely. An artist sketches a two dimensional impression of a flower; a novelist commits an imagined conversation to paper – meaning is imbued within a separate medium, altered yet understood.’’
“From his ‘painting with paper’ collages to his latest creations of wildly outsized and convoluted sculptures of money, candy wrappers, and newspapers, Paul Rousso has sought to flatten the dimensional and elevate the flattened: ‘There are many shades from one end of the spectrum to the other, but everything has an opposite. My work is about finding what comes next.’' For Rousso, a good deal of what’s next involves a process of crumpling, folding, tearing, gluing, and re-composing – turning the printed pages of a single Vogue magazine into a sculpted wall hanging, for example, or transforming every printed note of every Beatles’ song into a massive jumble of texture on canvas.’’
