Paul Rousso - The zigzag path of a driven Artist by Bugno Art Gallery

PAUL ROUSSO The Zigzag Path of a Driven Artist

Flat Depth PAUL ROUSSO: The Zigzag Path of a Driven Artist by Tom Patterson

Paul Rousso is a maniac. Not the dangerous kind. Rousso’s mania is more on the order of obsessive enthusiasm, and its object is his own work. A perfectionist constantly pushing himself to create something uniquely marvelous, he epitomizes the driven artist—with a bit of the mad scientist tossed in for good measure. For years Rousso pursued a singular aesthetic goal, working his way through a succession of creative approaches and a broad range of subjects in his relentless quest to achieve it. He aspired to be one of those artists who exert an enduring impact on subsequent artistic generations. From studying Western art history he concluded that an artist makes such an impact by subverting or overthrowing the conceptual framework for the preceding generation’s art. In contemplating how he might upend the aesthetic conventions of his own era, he remembered the pre-modern painters intent on creating illusions, especially the illusion of depth. All their skills went into making a two-dimensional surface look three-dimensional, like a scene you could peer into or an arrangement of objects you could reach out and touch. After the advent of photography Paul Cezanne jettisoned that approach, eliminating the illusion of perspective in order to emphasize the flat surfaces of his paintings. That emphasis was retained by subsequent generations of modern and postmodern painters, from Braque and Picasso to Johns, Warhol and Basquiat. The next logical step, Rousso concluded, would be to somehow render an originally flat object threedimensional, or maybe to collapse a three-dimensional object into two dimensions—as if that were possible. In thinking about this seemingly ridiculous idea, he coined the term flat depth. Whatever it might mean, no other artist had ever achieved it, or even tried, as far as he knew. If he could do it, he figured, it would stand as a significant achievement—maybe even one for the art-history books. Rousso’s longstanding fixation on this concept has been a guiding principle of his artistic practice. He started experimenting with it in large-scale paintings he made 20 years ago, and it loomed in the near background of his subsequent collage efforts before emerging to transform his art after the turn of the century. 1

Big Money The culmination of his work along this line—or at least the current state of its development—can be seen in recent sculptures such as his super-sized replicas of paper currency. Fabricated from Plexiglas, they’re so large it would require a mattress-sized wallet to hold them. Some are in denominations of $500, $1,000 and even $5,000—the original versions of which haven’t been printed since 1945 and were taken out of circulation in 1969. And—the crucial feature—they look as if they’ve been wadded up and discarded like scrap paper or in some cases like they’re gently floating down after being tossed in the air. Rousso’s process for creating his big bills—and other vastly enlarged paper documents or artifacts—is highly specialized and typically obsessive, worth following from start to finish for our purposes. He begins by making computer scans of his twodimensional subject matter, then he enlarges the scanned images to the desired size and spends several hours digitally enhancing them in ways specific to his purposes. He meticulously retouches them and adjusts the color, and only after completing this step to his exacting standards does the printing process begin.1 For his currency-based work, Rousso prints an image of a bill’s front side enlarged to fit a Plexiglas sheet measuring four-by-eight or sometimes five-by-ten feet, and about one-eighth inch thick. Because the cleanly machine-cut edges are conspicuously

different from the minutely worn, slightly discolored edges of a piece of circulated paper money, he leaves a little space around the enlarged front-side image, then carefully trims off the sheet’s unprinted edges to match those of a well-worn bill. Next he applies a clear varnish to the printed sheet in order to seal the simulated bill and give it a toothy texture, as well as a flat, non-glossy finish akin to that of paper money. He also paints the sawed edges to match the print’s base color. Having thus produced a giant-sized bill, Rousso moves on the next step: transforming it into a threedimensional form—a dynamic, gestural sculpture instead of a flat, two-sided print. This necessitates heating the sheet to make it malleable, a process for which he employs special custom-built equipment. To manipulate the hot Plexiglas he puts on two pairs of welding gloves—one over the other—and immediately starts bending and folding it to make it look like crumpled or wind-blown paper. This part of the process is improvisational, intuitive and necessarily quick, since it has to be accomplished before the sheet starts hardening again as it cools. Manipulating it too forcefully or for few seconds too long can cause it to break. Rousso continues to work the surface after he’s printed and sculpted a piece—scraping, sponging and retouching it with paint until he’s satisfied with every detail. It has to meet his standard of

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perfection, impeccably preserving the fundamental illusion. Finally, he must address the practical issue of hanging the piece, as all but a few of his big bills are intended to be wall-mounted. This involves attaching one or two hole-drilled Plexiglas blocks to the back side, in such a way that ideally they’re completely concealed when the piece is hung on a wall. He employs essentially the same expensive, labor-intensive, demandingly hands-on procedure to create his other works, including vastly enlarged simulations of commercial packaging and pages from books and newspapers. Attentive viewers will likely appreciate several things about these sculptures right off the bat. Most obvious, perhaps, is their kinship with 1960s Pop Art. Their bold graphics and high-key colors are appropriated from the same kind of commercial sources that informed that 50-year-old movement, but they have an aggressive sculptural presence that’s rare in Pop Art, with the exception of Claes Oldenburg’s work. Another distinctive feature is the crafted quality of Rousso’s work—an appearance of having been carved or otherwise rendered from wood or some other natural material, resulting from his intensely fussy treatment of their surfaces. These characteristics give each piece a strong “objectness,” to borrow a term Clement Greenberg made up to characterize Abstract-Expressionist paintings.

Wearing double-layered welding gloves to protect his hands, he removes the sheet and immediately starts bending and folding it to make it look like crumpled paper.

It has to meet his standard of perfection, impeccably preserving the fundamental illusion.

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High Achiever

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Rousso has said the most valuable lesson he learned from this early mentor was to be fearless in meeting the demands of any art project he took on, no matter how difficult or timeconsuming.

These sculptures represent the arrow-point of the creative trajectory Rousso has followed for most of his life. Confidence, ambition and a capacity for sharply focused attention have marked his career from the beginning. The youngest of four boys brought up in Charlotte, North Carolina, by a doting mother and a hard-working dad who owned a jewelry store he demonstrated a special aptitude for realistic drawing when he was still a child. He continued to show off his visual-art abilities through his adolescence, for personal amusement and for the attention it brought him. He learned to perform magic tricks early on for much the same reasons. Rousso recalls undertaking the latter pursuit as a hyperactive fourth-grader kept home from school while stricken with the flu. Confined to his bed in front of a portable television, he happened to see Tony Curtis as Houdini in the 1953 film biography. Inspired, he told his mother he wanted to learn the magician’s art, and she brought him two books on the subject. While recuperating, he taught himself a few coin tricks from these beginner’s manuals, and he eventually learned many more elaborate sleightof-hand maneuvers. Magic remained an enduring interest throughout his youth, to the point that he seriously considered pursuing it as a career. But by his mid-teens he was already starting to refine his visual-art practice, thanks in part to his studies with a public high-school art teacher who lit a fire under him.

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Dean Barber, the art instructor at Charlotte’s Myers Park High School, was locally well known as an inspirational, high-level teacher whose students consistently won more scholastic awards for their art projects than any other high school in the Southeast. Rousso delights in telling how, at age fifteen, he engineered his own expulsion from the private high school he’d been attending at his parents insistence, just so he could enroll at Myers Park and study with Barber. (His unforgivable infraction at the private school was bouncing a volleyball off his algebra teacher in front of a classroom of fellow students.) Barber taught his students about composition, classical drawing technique and the fundamentals of modernist theory. He was a tough task-master, but Rousso appreciated being pushed to do his best. And excel he did, earning ten scholastic awards for work he produced under Barber’s tutelage—a record at the time, he was told. Rousso has said the most valuable lesson he learned from this early mentor was to be fearless in meeting the demands of any art project he took on, no matter how difficult or time-consuming. He recalls the exact phrasing: “Whatever it takes.” Meanwhile, perhaps from his father, Rousso also learned to be enterprising. He was still in high school when he began to sell his work, usually to the parents of his friends, for prices in the low three figures. Most often these sales were for commissioned portraits based on photographs of their offspring, but he sometimes sold them his batik compositions or images of clowns and flowers.

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Prodded by Barber into continuing his art studies Prodded by Barber into continuing his art studies after high school, Rousso entered the Cleveland Institute of Art in the fall of 1977. Its rigorous, fiveyear undergraduate program was known for turning out industrial designers, but the Institute also placed serious emphasis on fine-art practice, with a distinguished studio-art faculty that included opart pioneer Julian Stanczak. Unfortunately Rousso was temporarily disabled about halfway into his freshman year, when he badly mangled his right thumb in the spinning blade of a table saw he was using. He underwent surgery to repair the damage, and his arm was placed in a cast up to his elbow. With his hand immobilized for months, he returned to Charlotte to recuperate at his parents‘ house. He managed to dissuade his father from filing a lawsuit against the Institute. While his arm was in a cast Rousso taught himself to draw and write with his entire arm, since he was unable to move his hand. This involved pinning a sheet of paper to a wall, standing before it like a painter before an easel, and moving his entire body to render words and images. It proved to be a useful exercise, enabling him to develop skills he would adapt to future professional endeavors and continue to employ in his personal creative projects. He later taught it to other art students by taping their arms to limit them in similar fashion when they attempted to draw. During his recovery Rousso applied to an art school closer to home, the Atlanta College of Art. To escape his parents and settle in before the fall semester, he moved to Atlanta that summer. After renting an apartment in Atlanta’s northern suburbs he found part-time work at Tomfoolery, a nightclub whose

magician proprietor Tom Mullica provided the nightly entertainment. The job temporarily rekindled Rousso’s interest in magic, as Mullica taught him a number of new tricks. Before the summer was over, Rousso’s plans took an abrupt left turn when he had a visit from his old friend Robert Zimmerman. A talented aspiring artist in his own right, Zimmerman had attended highschool with Rousso in Charlotte. Having graduated a year ahead of Rousso, he was about to enter his third year at the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland. He loved the school, and he convinced Rousso he belonged there too. Over his father’s objections, Rousso left Atlanta before classes even started at ACA, and he rode with Zimmerman back to the West Coast to join him at CCAC. “C h e r r y ” - 1 98 3 50”

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As it turned out, the school perfectly suited Rousso’s needs and temperament. It was a laid-back, lowpressure environment, but by that time he had developed enough self-motivation that he didn’t need to be pushed. He particularly appreciated the art-history classes, which encouraged a critical approach to the material. He found the instructors’ passion for their subject infectious, and he began to extract personal lessons from what they taught him. Also crucial to his development was the newfound access the Bay Area gave him to cuttingedge contemporary art. Especially important to his evolving ideas about art was a group show he saw at the Berkeley Art Museum that included Dan Flavin, Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, James Rosenquist, Ed Ruscha and Andy Warhol. Rousso began to think about the relationships between their work and that of their art-historical predecessors—a line of thought consistent with the progressive view of art history he had come to adopt.

In the summer of 1979, with his first academic year at CCAC behind him, Rousso visited a friend in New York and was unexpectedly swept up in a series of advantageous developments. Soon after arriving in the city he happened to meet a designer working for Robert De Niro on the design of the actor’s newly purchased loft in Tribeca. When Rousso was shown preliminary drawings for the project, he saw problems for which he didn’t hesitate to offer solutions, and the designer hired him on the spot as an assistant. The next thing he knew, he was meeting with De Niro to discuss details. For the rest of the summer he worked on the actor’s loft and a few other projects, including a re-design of the legendary El Morocco nightclub. It was a heady time for Rousso, then just barely out of his teens. In the evenings he sampled New York nightlife and began frequenting Studio 54, the disco and celebrity hangout, where Rousso became an honorary A-lister after impressing the doorman with a few magic tricks. Rousso could have stayed in New York and continued in this vein indefinitely, but he saw no future with his employer, whose credentials he felt were dubious, and by the end of the summer he found himself missing art school. Compulsive about finishing what he starts, he signed off on his design job, returned to the Bay Area and resumed his student routine at CCAC. A summer of cultural-studies classes in his hometown, at the University of North CarolinaCharlotte, made up for the semester he missed after his hand injury, thus enabling him to graduate from CCAC in 1981.

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studios, visiting film sets and sustaining himself with free food from crafts services. A high point of this interval was the moment he found himself sitting next to John Huston while Huston was directing the musical Annie.

With his newly acquired academic credentials Rousso went south to Los Angeles and sought work as graphic illustrator. The portfolio he carried around there—mostly drawings of beautiful women—failed to impress the art directors he visited. After a few weeks of this dispiriting routine, he found work in the scenic department at Warner Brothers Studios. It was his skill with a spray gun—learned from one of his teachers at CCAC—that got him the job. The work not only generated essential income but also proved invaluable to his creative and professional development, refining his painting skills, boosting his confidence to undertake large-scale projects and teaching him “how to fix any screw-up,” in his words. He stayed with the job for five months, then spent another two months hanging around Warners’

Dissatisfied with his further prospects in L.A., Rousso decided to go back New York, where several of his friends from art school had moved. In keeping with his previous experience in the city, he quickly found opportunities awaiting. He initially worked as a fashion illustrator, freelancing for Bride magazine, Bloomingdale’s and other clients. After about two years he landed a full-time job with an advertising firm, where he was soon promoted to art director— no small accomplishment for a 25-year-old only two years out of art school. During the ensuing Mad Men phase of his career he worked exclusively on the Revlon Cosmetics account, one of the most prestigious and coveted in the ad industry. He was riding high until the industry experienced an upheaval in the mid-1980s, when several major ad agencies merged, big clients switched agencies, and heads rolled. Amid the turmoil his firm lost the Revlon account, and in 1986 he was fired. It was a big fall, and it led him to start rethinking his priorities. Rousso’s experience and survival skills—including a gift for the sales pitch—helped smooth his transition back into freelancing. He struggled to support himself with commissioned illustrations and ad campaigns for different agencies until the summer of 1988. Then an extended vacation in Europe prompted one of those abrupt turns his life has had a way of taking.

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During a visit to the Musee d’Orsay he experienced a moment of personal revelation while standing in front of Edouard Manet’s The Fifer.

He made the trip at the invitation of a girlfriend who worked as a model and preceded him to France, where he joined her. After spending a few weeks together in Paris, they rented a car and toured the continent, visiting art museums and other sites where Rousso was able to see famous works of art he’d previously seen only in smallscale reproductions. Closely examining originals by Bernini, Raphael, Rembrandt and other great artists, he analyzed their techniques and compositional strategies as he tried to imagine creating such works himself. During a visit to the Musee d’Orsay he experienced a moment of personal revelation while standing in front of Edouard Manet’s The Fifer. Turning to his girlfriend, he declared, “I can do that!” Back in New York at the end of the summer, Rousso fell into a state of profound depression about his career. He felt that he’d sold himself short by occupying his time with commercial work at the

expense of his original creative aspirations. He wanted to refocus his energies on making art. Approaching his thirtieth birthday, he figured that if he was going to be an artist he’d better get started. Although he was already living in the capital of the contemporary art world, he opted to leave in order to make the kind of break that seemed necessary. He needed to retreat in order to figure out how to be an artist. So he returned to Charlotte. For his first few months back in his hometown Rousso worked as art director for a local ad agency in order to bankroll funds for his new plan. After briefly living with his parents he arranged to share a house with a friend, and he converted the adjoining garage into a studio. As a birthday gift from his parents, he acquired a selection of acrylic paints, brushes and other supplies, then at the end of the year he quit his job and started painting. He wasn’t sure what he might have to “say” as an artist, but

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he didn’t let that stop him from diving in. He began with a series of straightforward figurative paintings, sketching images on canvas and filling them in with color. The style was a mashup of influences from the commercial- and fine-art realms, notably Peter Max, Pat Nagel, Wayne Thiebaud and Van Gogh. They were essentially warm-up exercises, but he enjoyed making them, and he managed to find buyers, thanks largely to old contacts he renewed from his youth in the “Queen City.” In 1989, needing to expand his client base beyond his old friends’ parents, Rousso opened a small gallery for showcasing his work on the second floor of a building in “uptown” Charlotte, near several established contemporary art galleries. There he regularly showed and occasionally sold the straightforward, brightly colored paintings he’d started making.

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Breaking Through

By the early 1990s, eager to do something more substantial and relevant to the times, Rousso made a big leap into a series of more strategically experimental, extremely realistic paintings. Casting a critical light on the world of fashion and advertising, which he knew all too well, these works originated with collages he created by visually scrambling cutout photographs and ads from Vogue, Vanity Fair, Playboy and other commercial magazines. He made photographs of the collages and projected them onto canvases in order to efficiently reproduce them as large-scale acrylic paintings. The most ambitious paintings in this series mimic the format of open magazines or fold-outs, albeit on a vastly inflated scale, with the largest measuring about nine-by-20 feet. The standout piece from the series is Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (originally titled Big Steel, a mural-scale painting that suggests a vast, accordion-folded pinup viewed through an acid-trip lens. Fifteen sliced-and-diced, glamour-girl faces in a twotiered grid gaze seductively at the viewer and/or at the inanimate object of desire in the immediate foreground—a gleaming silver, cannon-sized

revolver clutched by a giant pair of immaculately manicured female hands. The painting reads as a coldly effective sendup of our society’s twin obsessions with sex and violence. In the process of making these paintings Rousso found his attention shifting toward their conceptual aspect, and specifically their treatment of surface and physical space. They’re based on photo-collages glued to slabs of mat board, and he noticed that each board developed a slight bow that was evident in the projected enlargement. Noticing this unanticipated anomaly prompted his attempt to replicate it in the paintings, a feat that was particularly complicated in the climactic Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. In that respect, this painting marks a preliminary stage in his quest to achieve the flat-depth ideal he had begun to conceptualize during his student years. It was a pivotal painting, a breakthrough from his previous work that pointed toward his future. It was also one of his first pieces to receive critical attention when it was first exhibited in 1995. Charlotte’s Spirit Square Galleries showed it alongside several other

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paintings from the same collage-based series in an exhibition favorably reviewed in the local press. One of those reviews was my own, in the Charlotte Observer. The Spirit Square show happened to be my introduction to Rousso’s art.2

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Those paintings were apparently too much for the generally conservative local art audience—too big, too content-charged and too expensive. Despite the critical enthusiasm, Rousso sold none of them. His roller-coaster experience with the exhibition led him to abandon the series, but he continued to explore related artistic strategies. Returning to his stash of pages ripped from popular magazines, he began experimenting with photo-collage on canvas, augmenting colors in the photographs with acrylic hues selected to blend in. The result was a series of densely composed “crowd scenes,” in which myriad figures with distorted facial features are tightly grouped in opulent settings cobbled together from photographs of buildings, lavish interiors or paradisiacal landscapes. Here again Rousso played with flatness and depth, in this case applying patchwork arrangements of photographic fragments and skillfully applied touches of paint to create claustrophobic scenes with exaggerated depth. He applied the paint with his fingers, for an expressionistic effect that counterbalanced the crisp photographic imagery. The technique conspicuously parallels that of Charlotte’s most widely known artist native son Romare Bearden, whose influence Rousso readily acknowledges—although the contrast between his imagery and Bearden’s could hardly be more pointed. The upscale milieu caricatured in Rousso’s crowd scenes is a vastly different world from that of the black rural sharecroppers and urban ghetto-dwellers portrayed in Bearden’s collages. Scenes of white privilege and luxury on the one hand, and of hardscrabble black poverty on the other.

Through the end of the decade Rousso was intensely involved with this series of collages, whose dimensions range between 40 and 60 inches. More mutedly satirical than the big paintings, they nonetheless crackle with manic energy, coming across as frenetically upbeat celebrations of urbanity, affluence and convivial sociability. Alluding to the high-powered, glamorous worlds in which he had operated in Los Angeles and New York before returning to the South, these collages also reflected something of the national mood at the end of the century. Their favorable reception by collectors was evidenced by fairly steady sales through the gallery that represented Rousso in Charlotte during those years.3 He was grateful for the income, since he married and started a family during those years. (He and his wife Joy have two sons, Maxwell and Alex.) Although commercially successful for a time, Rousso’s crowd scenes were critically ignored, perhaps due to the ambiguity of their content: Are they celebrations of the glitzy world they depict, or send-ups? Do they critique, or do they glorify?4 By the start of the new millennium, Rousso’s relationship with the local gallery came to an end, at a point when he sensed it was time to move on creatively. As much as he enjoyed making the crowd scenes, he knew they were thematically dated and realized they weren’t the groundbreaking pieces he aspired to create.

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Crumpled Paper The next body of work was more directly driven by Rousso’s old i·dée fixe. He had recently given up a 3,000-square-foot warehouse and relocated his studio to a room adjoining his garage at home, thereby reducing his work space to only 600 square feet. Maybe it was these new limitations that prompted him to focus unusually close attention on some pieces of paper he’d crumpled to toss away— torn-out magazine pages like those he’d cannibalized for his crowd scenes. He suddenly saw that they perfectly exemplified his concept of flat depth: When crumpled, a two-dimensional sheet of paper immediately becomes three-dimensional. Intrigued by this insight, he made a few realistic paintings of balled-up magazine pages. Then he tried another experiment, slathering a few magazine pages with paint and crumpling them as he glommed them onto a small slab of plywood. His manipulation of these random pages not only made them threedimensional, he mused, but also transformed them and their printed content—imagery and text—into abstractions. Wondering if he’d lost his mind, he signed this slapped-together assemblage and hung it up in his studio, where he contemplated it during unoccupied moments over the better part of a year. It didn’t look like much, but something kept him coming back to it. Eventually he was compelled to take the investigation a step further.

His first significant experiment with crumpled paper is a far more ambitious, conceptually developed piece on a substantially larger scale. In creating it he selected a standard 80-by-30-inch wood-veneer door slab as a surface, priming it with matte-black acrylic. Instead of magazine pages, he used the pages of an off-the-shelf King James Bible—all of them. Proceeding systematically, he carefully tore them out one at a time, dipped them into a tray of transparent, liquid matte medium, then mangled each wet page with his fingertips as he pressed it onto the blackprimed door, manipulating it almost as if it were a brush-load of paint. Finger-painting with paper. The process involved a strategic dance between system and improvisation, mental calculation and intuition. In order to get the spacing right without ever literally doing the math, he eyeballed it as he went along. Starting at what would be the upright door’s upper left corner, he worked his way vertically downward before returning to the top to repeat the pattern, and so on until he had covered it completely and used every page in the edition, with the final page applied in the lower right corner. The composition, titled Holy Bible, comes off as a more organic, texturally activated variation on the minimalist grid. Rousso has referred to it as a kind of still-life in which the subject is also the medium: “It isn’t of the Bible, it is the Bible.”5

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It was an important piece for Rousso, the beginning of a transitional project he dubbed the “Documents” series. His intentions regarding “flat depth” notwithstanding, this was a timely piece that connected on multiple levels. It related to ongoing currents in conceptual art and post-minimalism while engaging the national culture war, in which artists’ uses of religious symbols and texts had become a major point of contention. Controversies about religious symbolism in contemporary art had been—and remain—particularly heated in the Bible Belt, Rousso’s home region. Furthermore, he created Holy Bible only two years after September 11, 2001, when the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were attacked in the name of fundamentalist, bythe-book religion. He intended the piece mainly as an illusion to the Bible’s history as the first printed, mass-produced book, and to digital media’s rapid displacement of print.6

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Rousso employed the same technique to create the other “Documents,” in which he applied the mattesaturated pages of other widely recognized print publications to black-primed, standard-size door slabs. As with the first one in the series, he titled the others with the names of the publications he used to create them—The New York Times, The Yellow Pages etc. In the one titled Romare Bearden he paid direct homage to Charlotte’s most famous collagist by covering a door slab with the pages from a Bearden exhibition catalog.

Rousso has referred to it as a kind of still-life in which the subject is also the medium: “It isn’t of the Bible, it is the Bible.”

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Having created a dozen of these works, Rousso took what he saw as the next logical step. In each of the “Documents” he had in effect used an object— specifically a book or newspaper—as “paint.” So he started seeking a way to do the reverse: use paint as a sculptural medium. This led him to a series of works that he began by painting in a free-form, abstract-expressionist vein on a large sheet of glass. After the paint dried he coated it with a thick layer of clear acrylic gel, which he also allowed to dry before carefully peeling it all from the glass in one sheet—a major aha! moment for him. Then he vigorously manipulated this still malleable painting-with-no surface, sculpting it from one end to another, extending its gestural abstraction into the third dimension to yield—voila!—flat depth. When he had worked it to his satisfaction, he mounted it on a black-primed door pre-coated with more of the acrylic gel, still wet, and allowed the sculpted paint to dry in place. He gave these pieces more impressionistic titles like Dessert and Subway 80. Satisfied that these two bodies of work represented a significant aesthetic statement, he arranged to show them at open-entry art fairs in New York and Las Vegas. The effort netted a few sales and generated interest that led to a gallery show in Atlanta.7 Meanwhile, to support his family, Rousso continued to pursue assignments as a freelance graphic designer. Having learned to use Photoshop software around the turn of the millennium, he promptly

set about adapting his newly acquired skills and a measure of his creative energy to the needs of corporate clients. The business was steady and lucrative enough that it enabled him to buy a stateof-the-art digital printer capable of producing crisply detailed images measuring up to 70 inches wide and as long as needed. He soon developed a reputation for his advanced skills with the software, his ability to output large-scale images and his aptitude for blending paint with digital imagery, leading to commissions for several mural-scale “corporate portraits.” In each of these he combined thousands of photographs he made to present all facets of his client corporation’s business as if they were occurring simultaneously in one vast space. His most ambitious commercial project was the series of six huge, highresolution digital-printout murals he produced and installed in the Charlotte Bobcats Arena (now Time Warner Cable Arena) for its grand opening in 2005. They measured up to 15-by-60 feet each, and two of them remain in place as permanent fixtures.

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After the paint dried he coated it with a thick layer of clear acrylic gel, which he also allowed to dry before carefully peeling it all from the glass in one sheet—a major aha! moment for him. “F l a g W a v e ” – 2006 30”

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Technical Advances When he wasn’t using the big digital printer for commercial projects, Rousso turned it to his own creative purposes. Consistent with his ongoing flat-depth obsession, he began working out a means of printing on a flat material he could sculpt in the same way he sculpted sheets of dried paint. The initial system he devised was labor-intensive, timeconsuming and costly but effective. It yielded a sheet of glossy acrylic, roughly 1/8-inch thick, with the original images, texts and colors perfectly preserved on its surface. It was malleable enough that he could sculpt it, but sufficiently durable that it retained any form he chose to give it. To display these forms he attached them to black-primed boards suitable for wall-mounting. And so he added a third body of work to his fine-art output. Each series was open-ended, and together they kept him busy in his studio into the second half of the decade. Following from that third series—the crumpled images—Rousso made a major technical leap. It was prompted by a friend’s observation that those works could be rendered more solid by substituting sheets of Plexiglas for the acrylic substrate and heating the Plexiglas so it could be sculpted. Rousso set about testing the idea, but the print-transfer method he used with the acrylic gel wasn’t easily adaptable to Plexiglas, and this proved to be a significant obstacle. In 2010, after working on the problem for a couple of years, he gained access to a newly developed digital printer that employed heat to print on 4-by-8-foot sheets of vinyl. He discovered that these large vinyl prints could be applied directly to sheets of Plexiglas

and sealed with a clear, liquid laminate solution. When the laminate dried he was able to heat the Plexiglas so he could sculpt it. The latter process required two capable assistants working with flame throwers while Rousso sculpted the material by hand, wearing double layers of welding gloves. It was risky and troublesome, but he was able to make it work consistently in producing six successful pieces, each measuring five-by-ten feet. Financing the effort with an advance from a patron, he appropriated the print imagery for five of them from vintage pin-up cards in a friend’s collection. Opting to make more of a conceptual statement with the sixth piece, he enlarged both sides of a $100 bill and oriented them front to back on the Plexiglass, which he sculpted to give it his distinctively crumpled look. By prior agreement the patron was given his choice of one piece from among the six, and Rousso wasn’t surprised when he picked the $100 bill. Further confirming Rousso’s sense that latter piece was something special were the enthusiastic responses to a photo of it posted on Facebook. Among those who saw the post was a gallery owner in Miami, who promptly contacted Rousso with a request to show several big bills in his booth at Miami’s upcoming Art Basel art fair.8 Even though the fair was set to open just one week later, at the beginning of December, Rousso managed to produce five more bills, four of which he drove to Miami. In what amounted to a significant career break, the gallery sold three of them at the fair.

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particularly ambitious commissioned works he has combined a dozen or more such pieces to create sitespecific mural-scale installations.9

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That was a little over four years ago, as of this writing, and since then there’s been a steady demand for his work in this vein. Soon after his commercial breakthrough at Art Basel, he consulted with experts in glass and ceramic fabrication on a custom-built oven specifically designed to heat Plexiglas. The result was a coffin-shaped appliance functionally comparable to a giant toaster oven. It was a big improvement over the flame-thrower method, and it served him for a few years until he helped design a new, improved version—the oven referenced earlier in this essay. With this new technology at his disposal, Rousso has spent his studio time making more detailed refinements in his print-based sculptures and thematically extending this body of work. While continuing to produce new pieces in his open-ended paper-currency series—including examples based on Monopoly money and legal tender from other countries—he has created an array of permutations based on other familiar printed matter. Among the widely recognizable sources he has digitally sampled are candy wrappers, cigarette packs, matchbook covers, snack-food packs, trading cards, gift-wrap paper and illustrated book pages. In a few

Rousso appears to have his work eternally cut out for him, since the possibilities for new work in this vein are as endless as the world of extant printed imagery. The most recent additions to his bank of print sources are high-resolution photoreproductions of Old Master paintings, several of which he has translated into crumpled Plexiglas. Tangential to these bodies of serial work are relatively recent offshoots in which he has dispensed with the digital-printing phase of his process while retaining his expressionistic approach to sculpting the Plexiglas. The panels in his “Crumpled Aesthetic” series, for example, are entirely monochromatic, uniformly coated with iridescent color, sans imagery or text. The works in Rousso’s “City Papers” series, meanwhile, are essentially collaged sculptures in which black-painted, crumpled Plexiglas panels have been raggedly covered with ripped-off fragments of outdoor wall posters he has collected in different cities. And each of his “Draped Figures” consists of a monochromatic Plexiglas panel loosely shaped around the front of a mannequin, rather like a shroud covering a corpse. His work in all of these categories has attracted widespread interest and attention in gallery shows and art fairs across the United States and in Europe. Thus has Rousso been occupied in recent years. Intensely so. It takes a maniac to keep up the pace he has set for himself as he barrels through his sixth decade.

Stepping back from it all, just what is one to make of Paul Rousso’s work, especially his creative output over the last five years? What’s the basis for its demonstrable appeal? What does it “mean”? How does it relate to and connect with other recent and contemporary art? Manic tendencies aside, Rousso is clearly a “serious character,” to borrow poet Ezra Pound’s term for artists worthy of attention. He makes art because he has to, because it’s an incessantly urgent matter for him. Also integral to his motivations is his desire to connect with an audience. Like most artists he wants his art to be noticed and thought about, to give pleasure and stimulate the mind, to resonate on multiple levels of consciousness. This is why he employs carefully selected images and symbols that are universal in our consumer culture. These visual sources are already proven attention-getters, and they tend to evoke a range of nostalgic associations and other personal memories for viewers. Once he hooks your attention with this familiar material, he surprises and dazzles you with how he’s transformed it into something more—a versatile cultural metaphor and a (serious) play on dimensionality and illusionism. The bold transformations Rousso works on his sources—rendering them much bigger and more physically substantial—call attention to the insidious, propagandistic effects images can have. Among their other effects these works remind us that we’re overwhelmed with images, that all images can be manipulated, and that they’re often used to manipulate us. Rousso’s crumpled, post-Pop blow-ups and other recent works also stimulate a sense of wonder. They’re minor miracles, like props from a larger-than-life world that exists somewhere down the rabbit hole or through the looking glass, in one of those parallel realities of our wacky quantum universe. Forerunners of Rousso’s project include Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein and John Chamberlain. Also near the top of that list I would add Peter Voulkos, whose collapsed and mangled clay vessels come to mind in connection with Rousso’s sculptural approach. There’s an obvious element of celebration in Rousso’s appropriation of familiar commercial imagery, but his radical re-formatting of that material offers an implicit critique of the consumer culture that spawned it. It encourages us to question our complicity in the whole game. Someone is of course always trying to sell us something. The question is: Are we buying? And if so, why?

Rousso’s art shows us things we already know in ways that make us look at them afresh and ask new questions about them. In today’s media-drenched, image-saturated global marketplace, that’s no mean feat. Finally, what about Rousso’s original motivation for developing these bodies of crumpled Plexiglas sculpture—his “flat depth” concept and his attempt to find its potential significance for art history? Aside from their art-historical implications, his distinctive mode of playing with spatial relationships in these works reflects a fundamental interest in creating illusions, initially cultivated through the magic tricks he learned to perform in his youth. This interest has clearly served him well, rendering these works successful on multiple levels. Is flat-depth as big a deal as he clearly believes it is? When I’ve brought it up in conversation with other art-savvy folks I’ve found they tend to say “Huh,” or “Hmmm,” with varied inflections that suggest a range of responses. Certainly no such idea had ever occurred to me before Rousso explained it in our discussions of his work. But of course artists are in the business of generating new ideas or new approaches to old ones, and this one has also served him well. Without his concept of flat depth, it’s unlikely he would have developed the work he’s doing now, which I think is pretty special for all of the above-cited reasons. Whatever its intrinsic merits, I like it that he seized on the idea and ran with it, and I’ve found what he did with it to be visually compelling. He has created a new style—the crumpled look—if not a new form. Has he made a dent in art history with it? As usual, only time will tell. Tom Patterson Winston-Salem, North Carolina May 2015

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NOTES 1. Quotations and paraphrases otherwise unattributed are from the author’s interviews with Rousso, in person or by phone, between September 2014 and May 2015. 2. Tom Patterson, “Sex, violence as an obsession? Spirit Square exhibition shows us,” Charlotte Observer, February 12, 1995, pp. 1F, 4F. The exhibition reviewed in this installment of the author’s newspaper column paired Rousso’s paintings with thematically related pieces by ceramic sculptor Russell Biles. 3. Charlotte’s Joy Lassiter Gallery represented Rousso during the late 1990s. 4. Author’s note: By the time these collages works were exhibited in Charlotte I was no longer regularly reviewing visual art for the Charlotte Observer, as I did from 1992 to 1998. 5. From the Artist Statement on Rousso’s website: http://paulroussostudio. com/artist-statement/ 6. The edition of the Bible Rousso used to create his Holy Bible highlighted all passages attributed to Jesus in red ink. It’s interesting to note that these passages have faded into invisibility in the dozen years since the piece was completed, while the black ink hasn’t perceptibly faded. 7. Emily Amy Gallery in Atlanta showed examples of Rousso’s work in a duo exhibition with collagist Cecil Touchon. 8. Robert Fontaine Gallery, Miami, Florida. 9. Rousso’s 8-by-16-foot mural for the Greensboro Children’s Museum in Greensboro, North Carolina, is the most recent example.

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