NATURALLY SYNTHETIC

TODD BRAINARD AND PAUL PAIEMENT
April 1 - May 2, 2008

Often two person-or small group-shows bring together artists who share overtly similar aesthetic tendencies or conceptual concerns. While it is an understandable curatorial impetus, this sort of pairing usually does more to reduce the dialogue surrounding the respective artists' work to a comparative analysis of style, material, and content handling than it does to offer insight into how different artists with various motivations can be viewed together so as to expand the discourse concerning either. Todd Brainard and Paul Paiement are both meticulous painters and both deal with humankind's strange relationship with the "natural world" but their work's visual similarities end there. This exhibition presents how these two artists address the impact of the world that surrounds us by way of distinctly different methodologies. Brainard and Paiement provide interesting counterbalance to one another in that Brainard's hyper-real chemical landscapes are relatively stark, distant, and foreboding while Paiement's vividly rendered amalgams jocularly fuse various species of insects with consumer products ranging from athletic shoes to compact disc players. Although their mechanisms and subject matter are decidedly disparate both artists address the seemingly indeterminable boundaries that-we like to believe-separate the natural world from our synthetic reality. For anyone who lives or spends time in southern California, Todd Brainard's wide-angle landscapes will be familiar scenes. These are the sun-scorched golden rolling hills, dotted with scrub brush and punctuated by palm trees and oil rigs, that can be seen from the endless ribbons of freeways that stretch across the sprawling coterie collectively known as Los Angeles. But, at Brainard's hand, the familiar becomes unsettling as these vistas are reworked with unnerving chemical colors that create ironically claustrophobic atmospheres amidst extremely sparse topographies. Although no people are depicted, Brainard's paintings reflect the eerie psychology of a culture in which one finds it difficult to be wholly present but also nearly impossible to entirely escape. Paul Paiement's work is also deceptively familiar. What initially appear to be methodical scientific illustrations (à la John James Audubon) of beetles and butterflies are, upon closer investigation, careful assimilations that subsume common technical devices or other consumer products and a variety of insects in paintings the artist calls Hybrids. Paiement analyzes the seemingly disparate structures of the natural world as paired against the synthetic or plastic reality of human existence. They point to similarities among the organic patterns and shapes of insects and the design of any number of digital devices or commercial goods. These playful images are underpinned by the suggestion of universal architectonics. At the core of Brainard's and Paiement's respective projects is each artists' evaluation of the constructs-whether physical or psychological-that we use to delineate ourselves within nature's hierarchy. Both artists evince our inexorable interdependence with the natural world, however that world might be perceived, defined or reflected within the artificial paradigm we comfortingly refer to as reality.