Starting in 2007, JP Paul created several series of mixed-media works on canvas featuring diverse message and story-driven artworks that were simultaneously inquisitive, beautiful, and occasionally disturbing. Partial human bodies were reduced to forms and intertwined with other elements and props, including discarded mannequins, plants, flowers, pots, vases, bottles, animals, and sculpture plinths that served multiple purposes beyond their principal representation.
That series was named “Compromised”, one of several groups of work that along with “Indigo”, “20/20”, and “Screens” comprised most of the independent artist’s output between 2005 and 2015. The new series is titled "Challenging Perceptions" and focuses closely on one specific aspect of the previous series.
Between 2016 and 2021 JP Paul explored organic materials and alternative processes in purely abstract paintings and non-representational mark-marking studies that featured physical application rather than message sending. During the end of that period, a parallel return to writing and editing brought with it a desire to further explore some of the original stories and statements initiated in previous work.
“Challenging Perceptions” brings JP Paul back full circle to previous studies of variable perceptions both positive and negative as they relate to human beings struggling to take back control of their own lives in the face of social and political pressures being applied to the freedoms, liberties, and rights of woman, minorities, struggling families, and immigrants. Identity divisions surface both contextually and visually, with many of these symbolic abstractions featuring multiple dichotomies in the form of visual chasms and contradictions between beauty and pain, power and fragility, and strength versus submission.
According to JP Paul, "In 2007 we were planning another transcontinental relocation to the United Kingdom. I never felt that I had exhausted all avenues with the original Compromised series, but I was without adequate studio space to work on mixed-media work for well over a year. Once we resettled, other priorities dictated the path for the next few years. I'm thrilled I was finally able to revisit this body of work, and by the way things are developing so fluidly I hope to spend much of 2024 in this project. The main body of work is complete. Hopefully, I can find a gallery to partner with for these large works, but in the meantime, I'm also working around the edges with smaller tangential works that relate to the core."
Written by Richard Davis for Artfronts.com