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Inside and Out
John Haberin New York City
Paul Paiement, Hilary Pecis, and Landscape
Paul Paiement paints in the open air in the great American west, Hilary Pecis in the front yards and floral shops of Southern California. Paiement returns to a studied realism for an age that has seen it all come apart. Pecis may remind you more of pattern painting and the comforts of home. Which is closest to the promise of landscape painting and a bicoastal art world?
Just Plein Realism
Paul Paiement is a plein air painter, and you know what that means. Such an artist works on the spot, for the freshness of the afternoon, the freshest of impressions, and, tradition has it, the freest of brushwork. 
He is also a photorealist, for crisp, glistening, painstaking surfaces that record every detail and thrust it in your face. And then he is a trompe l'oeil painter, who can fool you into taking collage for paint and painting for the thing itself. If that seems a lot to handle, he keeps finding new ways to say "you are there"—and dares you to tell one from another. The labels can come later, if they apply at all.
Of course, those things cannot all be true at once, not for the most marvelous of painters. Paiement is not taking advantage of a glorious afternoon to take you up the Seine with Claude Monet and a boatload of the French middle class. Nor does he leave anything about the handling of his brush to chance. But Paiement does work outdoors, in the sun-baked American west. Impressionism led directly to the uncanny precision of Georges Seurat and Pointillism, but not even he would go there. If that sounds a bit forbidding for all its familiar glory, Paiement is all about bringing you close and standing apart.
He could be measuring out the distance. Where photorealism tends to mean portraits, including nude portraits, he has no obvious signs of life—not so much as the shadow of the artist or the feet of his easel. And where trompe l'oeil means still life, this is still landscape, and titles specify the location. It looks like collage all the same. Paiement paints on wood panels, leaving much of the grain exposed. He layers plywood strips and Plexiglas patches on top.
At any rate, I think so, because he can indeed fool the eye. One might mistake the painted areas for prints, torn freely and mounted on wood. Their edges look that dark and real. Even now I probably underestimate just how much is a single field of paint. Nor can I say for sure when clear Plexiglas allows a cloudy look at the surface and when Paiement continues to paint over the Plexiglas. Nature and handiwork come together.
Ultimately, he is painting, building an image of intense sunlight and measured shadows. Distant hills fade into the haze of saturated color, leaving that much more to move forward into the picture plane. The cloudiness of Plexiglas could be part of that haze. The wood grain in unpainted areas can seem part of the scene itself—or the same scene in a different season or under a different light. It is palpable but visual. It just may not be what you expect.
Paiement has worked closer to home, but always in sunlight. Past work in his "Nexus" series has included offices and industry in its imagery and architecture. Nature's pillars in his new work look almost manmade as well. Still, that kind of architecture is notoriously distancing. It is hard to imagine living in his work or escaping it. Painting has its illusions, its categories, and its myths.
Welcome to the neighborhood
Hilary Pecis opens her home and studio to visitors. She takes one into the lives of her neighbors as well without so much as a person in sight—and what lives they are, and what a life. Once you have been inside, you may never want to leave. You never could take it all in, not when her compositions run every which way and there is so much to see. It gives new meaning to "pattern and decoration" in painting, without an unbroken pattern and with too many specifics in time and place to write it off as decoration. Now if only you could be sure that you would not stand out like a sore thumb.
Pecis deals not just in sunlight, but in sensation. She brings you close to share the intimacy and outside to take in the view. Cats glare back, as cats do, but so near that they could almost be in your lap—or you in theirs if only they had one. Books fill shelf after shelf, and you may want to step past the flowers to inventory every title. Besides, books, too, can be an arrangement of shapes and colors. So can coffee cups, tablecloths, comfortable chair cushions, and the furniture to hold it all.
The bursts of sensation keep coming on a front lawn where trees and flowers compete with the architecture, white stones on red soil, and each other. Here, it would seem, people celebrate Christmas year round, to judge by a plastic Madonna and shepherds. But no, this is LA or an ideal version of it, where welcoming warmth and sunlight last through December. Still, a New Yorker would recognize the signs of home. The shepherds could pass for family by the porch waiting to see you, like Brooklynites on a stoop. Just one painting leaves home entirely, but there, too, for a single destination—and the shop sells flowers.
"Pattern and Decoration" arose in the 1970s as one more nail in Minimalism's coffin. Artists like Valerie Jaudon and Miriam Schapiro combined feminism and excess. It also proclaimed painting's special nowhere, where patterns matter more than what they cover. Pecis, in contrast, stuck to Southern California, but also to a sense of place. It seems only right that the flower shop gives its phone number on the awning. You could look up the area code online for a map of LA. You could look to the books, with an enviable choice of artists and philosophers, for a reminder of who you are.
Of course, they also define a class—a class of readers, but also of buyers. If the coffee cups have a further clash of geometry and color, you can assume that smart shoppers brought them home. These shoppers keep up with contemporary design and have the money to do so. But you could see that from the homes themselves, from the breadth of a porch and gabled roof to an alluring stairwell broken by shadows. I could easily feel guilty about belonging there. I may not live like this, but I do love the right artists and have read the right books.
Pecis can seem a lightweight—and ready confirmation of one's suspicions about money in art. The show opened the week of New York art fairs, with their display of wealth. Still, she is not taking the easy way out. Maybe the movement artists better known in New York would look less comforting if they shared her sense of place. Her very wildness disrupts a skeptical narrative as well. The flower shop has its own profusion of signs and samples.
Paul Paiement ran at Ethan Cohen through November 23, 2024, Hilary Pecis at David Kordansky through October 12.