Statement

Modern Art in the 20th century, from Braque and Picasso to Johns and Lichtenstein, is essentially the flattening of the picture plane. Certainly, many other things occurred, but this is at the heart of 20th century painting. The Cubists viewed three-dimensional subject matter, such as nude figures or objects, and reconstituted what they saw into flat geometric planes and painted them onto a two-dimensional canvas - two-dimensional painted images of three-dimensional subject matter.

The Pop artists “cut to the chase” and painted two-dimensional subject matter, such as flags, printed items like comics, a label, a target, onto the two-dimensional picture plane of the canvas. All of this “flattening” addresses the truth about the 2-D reality of the canvas. My work has always been about addressing this theme in 20th century painting. In doing so I hope to answer the 21st century’s call.

By taking an everyday 3-D object - a book, a magazine, a newspaper - and applying it to a 2-D surface, in order, in its entirety, I have arrived at what I have been searching for, for 30 years. “A new language that perfectly represents my slot in time, created in direct response to the old language that represented their slot in time.”

I use the subject matter of the painting as the paint.

I have done away with traditional paint and brush. The idea of the re-creation of subject matter or the invention of abstraction. Realism and abstraction have merged. I do not make a pigmented recreated image of the King James Bible; it “is” the King James Bible, in order and in its entirety. For the first time we can view the entire Bible all at once. Applying all the pages onto a flat, rectangular surface changes the subject drastically. It is quite abstract yet it is quite real: an everyday 3-D object, flattened for the 2-D picture plane. Literally. One might call this new language, “literalism”. This is not a 2-D, pigmented illusion of the Yellow Pages, this is the Yellow Pages. Each piece is created by the order, texture and the amount of the material of the subject matter. The paper from the Bible is extremely different compared to that of The New York Times. Each subject of each piece creates a new reality from its old reality by utilizing the subject as the medium.

Soon, these everyday objects that we take for granted will be as anachronistic as the wagon wheel. The audience for this work has not yet been born.

Bio

Paul Rousso is a Charlotte, North Carolina native and a 1981 graduate of the California College of the Arts in Oakland, California. His assignments have ranged from designing the Tribeca loft home of Robert DeNiro, to being a scenic artist at Warner Brothers Studios on many movies and television shows, to being a staff art director for Grey Advertising responsible for the Revlon account. He received paint for his 30th birthday and returned home to become an artist. Rousso has shown his work all over the country in New York, Los Angeles, Palm Beach, New Orleans, and Atlanta, as well as many cities in North Carolina. Rousso was the first artist named to the Charlotte Business Journal’s Forty under Forty. Paul has been named “Best Artist” by many major local publications. He has work hanging on permanent display in the Charlotte Convention Center, the Charlotte Aquatic Center, (commissioned by the Charlotte Arts and Science Council), Gorelick Education Center and the Aquatic Center of the Sandra and Leon Levine Jewish Community Center. You can also see his work at Harper’s Restaurants in Charlotte and Greensboro, Mimosa Grill and Upstream in Charlotte and in many corporate offices and private homes. Rousso was the only artist to be privately awarded a commission to produce six different pieces of art, each consisting of multiple panels, 15’ x’16’ each, for the interior of the state-of-the-art Charlotte Bobcat’s Basketball Arena, in Charlotte, North Carolina. Paul Rousso was most recently awarded a commission to paint a 22’ painting for the lobby of the premier creative marketing communications firm in Charlotte, Wray Ward.

Press

“You could argue that Rousso is Charlotte’s most prolific artist in terms of square footage; he has humongous pieces at places including Bobcats Arena and the Charlotte Convention Center, as well as various corporate headquarters.”

— Conversation: Paul Rousso, "Uptown", February 2008

“At this point, Rousso says he could feel it, taste it, was on the cusp of the next major breakthrough in the progression of art as form. He took the entire Bible, a 3-D object, and took each page out, flattened it, pasted it in order on a board. Same for the Yellow Pages, in order. Neat, sure, taking a 3-D everyday object and not painting it, but painting with it: object as paint. But still, simply an inversion of what he was really up to, which he then discovered: paint as object.”

— "The Business Journal", Aug 8, 2007

“Rousso has work on display at the Bobcats Arena, the Convention Center, the JCC, the Aquatic Center, Harper’s and Mimosa. You can’t see much of Charlotte without seeing Rousso. Independent, arrogant, ubiquitous, intractable and a little insane, this homegrown artist is our own lunatic mix of Walt Disney, Vincent Van Gogh.”

— Best Commercial Fine Artist, "Creative Loafing", August 2, 2006

“Your Charlotte may not be my Charlotte, and my Charlotte may not be yours. But Paul Rousso’s Charlotte is the one that’ll go down in history."

—Help make art from a bit of history, "The Charlotte Observer", June 7, 2005

“’Art of the Twentieth Century’ is one of Rousso’s latest paintings, one of his best, and the first one of the rest of his painting life. It is the physical dissolution of the coffee table book by the same title, a crumpled, torn and pasted reduction of every historical high art influence of the last century. This collage is an all-over field painting, an edge-to-edge uniform reduction of countless images to a single field of arrange spectral color – dark and light, no figure no ground. Figuratively , it’s point of rebirth – a masticated, swallowed and digested body of information every artist will either assimilate or leave in his rear view mirror.”

—The Rebirth of Rousso, "Creative Loafing", May 25, 2005

“Local Art 101 – Paul Rousso is one of Charlotte’s most incredible talents. He has been voted Best Artist by more than one publication and he is among only a few artists ever to be on the [Charlotte Business Journal’s] ”40 under 40” list. "

—Paul Rousso: Artist, "Elevate", September 2004