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PHOTO REALISM
A Photographer’s Ode to Architecture • • To some, architecture is purely a means of protection — four walls and a roof. While to others (and we hope to all reading this magazine), it is an art form. To the photorealist Paul Clemence, who has been documenting the architectural grandeur around him since he was a child in Brazil, it is poetic. Clemence takes a surface of a building — the exterior of Oscar Niemeyer’s Teatro Popular de Niterói, for example — and photographs it intimately, so its glass and metal grid-like façade is no longer part of the building but more akin to a stand-alone work of art. Through his lens, the surfaces on this theater across Guanabara Bay from Rio de Janeiro are not just walls and boundaries; they have a life of their own. Which is why he refers to them as “skins.” “It goes beyond exterior photography,” Clemence says. “When a wall has a pattern to it, it has a poetry.” And now his lyrical take on architecture has been compiled into a photo-
graphic exhibition entitled Skin, on view from April 1 through mid-May at the Visual Arts Pavilion at Young Circle’s ArtsPark in Hollywood. The exhibit features 12 select images from Clemence’s portfolio, ranging from a close-up of a construction site to the glass-walled masterpieces of Oscar Niemeyer. “A building’s skin should tell its personality,” Clemence says. “It should make a gesture toward its surroundings.” The skins don’t necessarily have to be exteriors of buildings: RED is a photograph of reddish paint peeling on an access ramp at Niemeyer’s Museum of Contemporary Art in Niterói. Another photo, Sheer Blue 1, is of a scaffold protecting a temporary renovation at a Rio opera house. “It was covered in a beautiful blue screen,” he says. “It was so simple yet perfect.” Interiors are included as well, including Honeycomb/Orange, which depicts an orange glass hallway designed by the architect Rem Koolhaas at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago. Like all good photographers, Clemence utilizes light and shadow to his advantage. In Hexagons, which features a brise-soleil on a MiMo hotel on Miami Beach, Clemence captures it in just the right light, when all its intricate patterns have cast even shadows on the wall behind it. It’s intensely rhythmical, or as Clemence poetically puts it, “a dance.” —Jillian Mills 1 Young Circle Blvd., Hollywood | 954 921.3500 | hollywoodfl.org/artspark/
vapavilion.htm | paulclemence.com
FROM TOP: Lightstreaks, a close-up photograph of a metal fence surrounding the exterior of the New Museum in New York City. Sheer Blue 1 was taken of scaffolding wrapped in a blue protective screen outside a beaux-arts-style opera PHOTOS: © Paul Clemence
house in Rio.
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