Excerpts from Recent Reviews
excerpt from Sara Mulloy's Milwaukee Journal review of
"Reconnection" at the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design
November 18, 2009
"Reconnection" at MIAD
"Laura Paulini's geometric paintings seem to impossibly combine both balance and chaos. She invokes Op Art and a deliriously meticulous, handmade pattern. Made with a succession of dots created with the tip of a chopstick, Paulini's paintings are studies in sensitive shifts of color. The works are a beautiful and intelligent combination of design and mark making."
Click here to visit the Milwaukee Journal's website and read the full review.
excerpt from Patricia Maloney's Artforum.com Critics' Pick review of
"Allegories of Control" at Eleanor Harwood Gallery
May 2009
Laura Paulini and Jill Sylvia
"Paulini constructs...intuitively, applying uniform dots of egg tempera to panel, often working out from the center. She miscalculates points of convergence, encouraging seams to misalign and rhythms to fall apart...Tension is exacerbated by lacunae peppered throughout her compositions...The individual colors shimmer on close inspection..."
Click on image to download a pdf of the entire article.
excerpt from Alan Bamberger's artbusiness.com review of
"Allegories of Control" at Eleanor Harwood Gallery
April 25th, 2009
Eleanor Harwood Gallery: Laura Paulini & Jill Sylvia - Allegories of Control
"...the levels of systematic precision and discipline necessary to produce the art in this show verge on incomprehensible..."
Click here to download a pdf of the article.
excerpt from Cate McQuaid's Boston Globe review of "microwave: seven" at Judi Rotenberg Gallery
April 2009
Creating worlds of their own
"Laura Paulini's "From the Center of the Square #2" was made by dabbing dots on paper with a chopstick, resulting in shimmering moth-eaten rainbow quadrants."
excerpt from Daniel Larkin's Art Cal: The Zine review of "The One and The Many" at Repetti Gallery
June 2008
On the Work of Laura Paulini
"Dot by dot, row by row, column by column, Paulini creates geometric Op Art patterns with a pointillist style. From a distance the Tron-like grid is clear but as a viewer approaches the field dissolves into a series of well placed dots. This game of distance and watching the image modulate with each step is one trademark of good pointillism that her works display with flying colors."
Click here to visit Art Cals's website and read the full review.
excerpt from Chelsea Now review of "microwave: five" at Josee Bienvenu Gallery
September 2007
microwave: five at Josee Bienvenu Gallery
"This annual exhibition of works on paper by 20 international artists who observe various processes of fragmentation. The show also conveys a dialogue of generations between younger artists such as Xawery Wolski, Jesse Alpern, Adam Fowler, Laura Paulini, Ken Solomon, and Cameron Martin, and the likes of Yayoi Kusama, Richard Tuttle, Fred Sandback, Jacob El Hanani, Ray Johnson, and Tom Friedman."
excerpt from Jordan Essoe's Artweek review of "Day Trips" at Takada Gallery
May 2006
Laura Paulini at Takada Gallery
"...a typical finished work has around 8,000 consecutive shallow penetration marks. On average, Paulini spends eight to twelve hours completing one of these pieces, working continuously for one sitting...The division of time, of one series of moments amputated from another series of moments, allows for claims of specific significance. All defined increments become potential anniversaries, setting precedents from future segmentation...Her work is about conservation of units, to propose time as efforts to contain it, and to invent a grammar for it. Intrinsic to her logic is that time indivisible is meaningless both quantitatively and qualitatively...As a principle part of her John Cageian score, Paulini attempts to make clean, straight rows of marks...Near the bottom margin of the picture, her inscriptions are obviously craned, compressed and delightfully bothered with organic honesty. There are not actual inaccuracies possible in work like this, or failures to articulate the predetermined...her works' tonality and weight are based exclusively on shadows, which are furtive and fugitive...different light distributions over the face of these paintings can be dramatically transforming or even brutally realigning, distorting or bullying to their countenance. No matter how stoic they are in their structure, they turn the authority of their form over to the higher court of ambiance..."
excerpt from David Buuck's Artweek review of "The White Album" at the Kala Art Institute Gallery
May 2006
'The White Album' at Kala Art Institute
"Could there possibly be any more that can be done with the "white canvas"? Can such artistic purity, or minimalist restraint, still bring anything new to painting in the new century, now many years removed from earlier eras of such radical innovation? The six artists showcased in the recent exhibition at Kala Art Institute in Berkeley demonstrate that there is still a lot one can do with a limited palette. In fact, such restraints often challenge the artist to push herself in to new, subtle variations of technique and form...Laura Paulini also worked in series, showing nine works of white oil on panel, each roughly one foot square. Each piece was produced in a day, placing emphasis on quick, improvisatory marks and formal decisions, while staying within the restraints of size, materials and color. The individual pieces thus become records of the artist's workday, where the materials surfaces of brushstrokes, marks and gauges work to form patterns and textures that take on their own form in each new work. The thickness of Paulini's oils also allowed the surfaces to hold the light, to invite shadow and depth into the "white painting"...
excerpt from Jordan Essoe's Artweek review of "Paper Cuts (again)" at the Fetterly Gallery
November 2005
'Paper Cuts (again)' at Fetterly Gallery
"...One artist who tracks precisely that tension between force and fault is Laura Paulini from Mills College, whose sophisticated talent clearly stands out...Paulini braces herself carefully between making marks by hand and removing her own rambling humanity from those maneuverings. The extent to which she delivers on the imperfections within her mechanized process is subtle, as she starves herself for a minor glimpse of the shaky irregularities that hands fight for as they endeavor to echo their own form. For Attention Deficit Restorer, Paulini imprinted a topograhical grid of small colorless divots into a sheet of watercolor paper, performing eight strikes a day using a chopsitck and a hammer. She tracked the zigzagging inconsistency of her eyeballed measurements with small, pale pencil strokes to try to keep herself more even, and the resulting pencil matrix appears both unconscious and scientific. 24 Hour Painting entailed Paulini painting an unbroken record of the migrating color and opacity of the sky for a continuous twenty-four-hour period. Again Paulini struck the paper percussively, this time with the tip of a loaded brush, and the carefully repeated, intricately typographic pattern runs horizontally for twenty-four separate color bands down the length of the paper..."
