Trailing Away

Paul Verdell

02.19.2023 - 03.25.2023

Jupiter Contemporary is pleased to present Trailing Away, by Detroit-based artist Paul Verdell, a new series of works created in his home in Detroit and during his residency at Black Rock in Senegal this past fall. With these new works, he experiments freely with gesture and application through a constant cycle of creation to create these captivating panoramas.

Featuring 7 new canvases and 2 works on paper, the exhibition displays Verdell’s quickness to capture the emotion, and results in the works presenting varying exposures of paper between the strokes and fields of color. This lightness is a prominent characteristic of his unique style, inspiring a feeling of ephemerality and fleeting exchange, and allowing the viewer space to explore meaning.

Creating his landscapes using his memory as reference, Paul Verdell manages to bring feeling to the foreground of his work practice. There’s been a distinctive shift in his work though, a move that was a long time coming for Verdell. This departure from representational art is a natural progression, as he claims it was “only a matter of when”. A consistency in his practice has always been a focus on the immediacy of his mark-making. Both in his early portraits and his current works, his use of color is instinctive. For Verdell, it was the presence of the subject during their sitting that guided the psychology of each piece. That process remains true with his newer works, where it is now the invocation of the landscape in front of him that reveals the conceptual framework of each piece. His focus on this process results in these luminous and wild expanses of pigment that highlight his agility and proficiency with color.

Post-Impressionist and Fauvist influences are communicated through the abandonment of precision in favor of a more fluid form of figurative work, where unnaturally vibrant colors become flesh and limbs, and figures merge with their surroundings.

The closer you look into Verdell’s works, the more you notice the impressions of the oil stick on canvas, the varying pressures and concentration of pigments that render these spectacular seascapes. By working mutually with his material, the outcome becomes a reflection of the artist’s inner dialogue of an attempt to understand himself within a constantly fluctuating world.