Paul Roux
Paul Roux graduated in 1998 from the Michaelis School of Fine Art (University of Cape Town, South Africa) with majors in painting, theory of art and art history.
His university work was concerned “essentially with the fine line between life and death; with the fact that many of us become removed from our bodies, too `civilized’ or distracted by material aspirations accept that, on one level, we‘re just pieces of meat and that our flavor and individuality tends to be spoiled by out of the bottle marinates whose primary ingredients are Hollywood drivel and advertising spewed up by greedy vendors of automobiles and cosmetic products.”
Having always been fascinated by consumer culture, during the course of 1999 he elected to pursue a career in advertising and thus, as many young artists do, to run away from a career in fine art. Paul describes his fervent recommitment (having been working again on a full time basis for three years) that has seen him produce two successful solo exhibitions in 2005 and receive a scholarship to further his studies at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, in Boston:
“Having spent more than enough of my lifetime in the ´normal´ world (roughly four years in various advertising and marketing roles), I realized that I was lying to myself, that I would never be ´normal´, that I didn´t want to, and that I had no major material aspirations - other than to have paint to paint with, a pen to write with and a place to do it in. My manifesto in brief: to delight in and to exalt the beauty in the world and, in so doing and wherever possible, help to expose the veils of illusion that frame majority existence.”
While sometimes concerned primarily “with the painted surface, the work usually contains subtle (even if purely by inference of my self and my disposition into my work) references to the superficial consumer culture and mass media hysteria that seem to delineate our lives on a global human scale, rich or poor.”
His solo show, entitled "beached" (2005/2006), hoped to engage viewers in a gentle and positive way in the reality of lack of human alignment with the rest of the planet, and, indeed, the universe. Installed as large scale collections of ‘single moments past’ and accompanied by written wall text, each painting represents the romantic ideal of a single passing moment, unaware of, and seemingly un-spoilt by, the cumbersome commercial activities of everyday modern existence. Yet the reality, as the viewer is sometimes aware, is that these landscapes are not unaffected by our industry and that we are entering a time where the years of abuse of our natural environment seem set to turn round and smack us in the face. Paul says of the beached series: “Through a process of cropping and subverting `traditional´ landscape formats and working on large ‘walk-in’ surfaces I try to set up a dramatic allegory for this separation between `humanity´ and `nature’ - the paintings deliberately retaining some of their digital quality in translation, vibrating between sentimentality and melancholy and between so-called realism and abstraction.”
