On January 11th, STEMS Gallery in Paris will open a new solo show by Philadelphia-based painter and Juxtapoz favorite, Paul Rouphail.
Paul Rouphail is a painter living and working in Philadelphia. Based in the tradition of still-life painting, his canvases subtly undermine their own realism with details reaching just beyond logical comprehension. Rouphail’s works present genre-bending scenes within scenes reminiscent of seventeenth-century European and twentieth-century American landscape painting renewed with psychologically and politically pointed components. Drawn from life, memory, and the history of painting, the everyday objects in Rouphail’s images intimately inform and contradict one another through an atmospheric blend of sharp light and various visual layering devices. Recurring subjects like overflowing beverages, neatly prepared meals, books, insects and flags become the compositional guidelines for his work, functioning as both framing devices and stand-ins for the figure. Walls and windows cut sharp profiles against deep pictorial space, foregrounding an array of beguiling subjects within luminous—and ominous—settings
