LAURA PAULINI |
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Excerpts from Recent Reviews excerpt from Chelsea Now review of "microwaves: five" September 2007 microwaves: 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" 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..."Click here to visit Artweek's website and order a copy of the May issue. excerpt from David Buuck's Artweek review of "The White Album" 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"...Click here to visit Artweek's website and order a copy of the May issue. excerpt from Jordan Essoe's Artweek review of "Paper Cuts (again)" 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..."excerpt from Kenneth Baker's San Francisco Chronicle review of Gen Art "Emerge" Tuesday, November 15, 2005 Nice surprises at this year's 'Emerge' show for new talent "Gen Art, the national organization that spotlights new talent in the arts and fashion, has scored a very mixed record with "Emerge," its annual San Francisco visual arts extravaganza. But this year's edition, the eighth, rocks...A surprise awaits around nearly every corner in "Emerge..." Except for Laura Paulini's obsessive, process-oriented abstractions and Jeong-Im Yi's spare, realistic pictures of scarred walls, "Emerge" represents new painting as a fairly conceptual affair...Not everything in "Emerge" hits the level of the work I've described, but the show as a whole leaves a visitor feeling light and optimistic. See it." Here is the full text of this review. excerpt from Melissa E. Feldman's artUS review of "Cream" October/November 2005 Cream "...But it is labor-intensive, process-oriented work that emerges as a dominant trend in this selection, and perhaps reflects a mood swing in the Bay Area at large...In more monk-like fashion, Laura Paulini recorded the sunrise every morning last February by filling a small sheet of paper — one per day — with rows of dots in foggy colors that fade until the brush is replenished with paint..." excerpt from Colin Berry's Artweek review of "Cream" October 2005 'Cream: From the Top' "...Two other artists demonstrated superhuman rigor. For The Sky at 6 a.m. Every Morning in February, 2005, Laura Paulini created twenty-eight matrices of acrylic and watercolor dots, which rippled in close-set waves down each sheet. Equal parts painting and meditation, the piece called forth a calm mindfulness that contrasted nicely with much of the rest of the show..." excerpt from Lindsey Westbrook's Artweek review of "Bay Area Currents 2005" July/August 2005 'Bay Area Currents' at the Oakland Art Gallery "...The only artist in the show who works in an abstract mode is Laura Paulini, and even in her case, the titles of her paintings refer to the real-world instruments of their making: Chopsick, Dental Pick or Cardboard. Each canvas is the product of a single sitting. Using a pointed object, Paulini carefully and patiently stipples the surface of a swath of modified oil paint. While it might seem a bit obsessive at first, her process is much more an exercise in not-controlling, but rather allowing a rhythmic, methodical, unconscious process to take over the body..." excerpt from Tony Cooper's San Francisco Chronicle article Friday, October 17, 2003 Art for people's sake: paintings, sculptures do more than decorate in Martinez courthouse project "...Neither did Laura Paulini, who used to do her work in Benicia and now has a studio at Oakland's Mills College. Paulini has a pair of charcoal drawings in the center's lobby. 'It's quite conceivable that 50 percent of people may not even notice," said Paulini. "(But even) if it touches only one person, it's worthwhile. I hope my work provides the viewer something to contemplate as they're going through their stressful situation...'" |