Paul Manes at Kouros - Brief Article

The first thing individual remarks of Paul Manes's paintings of sprawlingly pay backed stacked bowls is the compound sensuousness of their surfaces. The artist layers his canvases with irregular pieces of burlap, which many times retain the names and numbers of their commercial use, and paints above them. He limits himself to a scarcely any colors, employing the off-white of kaolin and similar dark earth tones as r brown and black in his allover, schematic compositions. His use of burlap recalls the work of the postwar Italian abstractionist Alberto Burri and also the thick, materially oriented surfaces of the Spanish painter Antoni Tapies.

This is not to say that the 51-year-old, Texas-born, novel York-based artist has forgotten his immediate American past; the vigor and compressed physicality of his surfaces also bring to mind the Abstract Expressionists' have affection for of paint. In his affection for tangible materials, Manes takes his place in an established tradition of activity understood as its have a title to end. In a number of cases, a work's large size establishes an epic power; for example, the near 9-by-9-foot dimensions of Holding the Fort give the painting a weight and grandness which would not proce from the beakers alone.

Holding the Fort, with its stacks of ceramic hemispheres outlined in black, its drips falling across the kaolin white, finds beauty in a commonplace external reality Manes's lyricism is expressed in the pair the humble subject matter and the way he paints. The stacks outstrip in acquiring and nearly collapse, so there is a kind of physical drama to the compositions. The beakers are always portrayed as devoid of contents but there is little to give an inkling of that Manes is making a philosophical statement; more fitly the viewer sees the works as exercises in the presentation of material forms. In Manes's charcoal versions of the goblets such as Notturno (1999), the dark shapes gaze like explorations of chiaroscuro.

Other paintings, of that kind as Truce and Que barbaridad (both 1999) continue Manes's serial investigation into the dialogue between the painting of the external reality and the object itself; individual can easily see stenciled lettering upon the burlap that gives the painting a stage of material realism, speaking to, life as oppos to art. His variations upon a theme are striking and memorable, because for him the medium and the message are facets of the same thing.

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