"JUNE, JULY & AUGUST" PAUL ROUPHAIL: Brussels

 Stems Gallery presents June, July & August, a solo exhibition of oil paintings by American painter, Paul Rouphail. This is the artist’s fourth exhibition with the gallery. 

 

As in the first page of a book or the introductory scene of a movie, the painting says, “you are here”. This proclamation where space and time merge is at the heart of Paul Rouphail’s work. Space is explored throughout the exhibition, combining of elements and techniques reminiscent of the Hudson River School, American Regionalism, and the history of cinema. In three of the ten new paintings, time is represented ambiguously and ominously by calendar dates, painted in plain, cream-white lettering. 

In quoting the the manner in which a film by French director Eric Rohmer is chaptered or in which a domestic interior of a Yazujiro Ozu film is staged, Rouphail’s use of illusory markers of time give the viewer a starting point: the impression of a moment, the seasonality of a feeling. In the artist’s pantings, what appears to be precisely staged is not frozen, but is merely an echo. June, July & August is both a memory and a premonition. 

This distortion, ardent yet vague, is unique to travel. That of sudden arrivals and furtive departures from hotel rooms, which mark the stops on a journey like breadcrumbs on a road, the kind that the artist takes every year to California in his car. It is an opportunity to create an ascetic life, conducive to isolation and introspection. On such journeys, the horizon can be outlined by the roof of a building or the peaks of a mountain. A pile of books, the piece of bread, are the rudimentary, established motifs that convey the simple repetition of a moment in a brief period of time. A moment when space collapses, when landscape and objects come together on the same plane if only briefly, upsetting the scales. A moment to hold in one’s hands something condensed, intense, but which like a film frame, immediately slips away to mix with other versions of itself.