Paul Waddell
BEAT-A-RETREAT
February 20th – April 24th, 2021
In his first solo exhibition with AERO SALON, Oklahoma City based artist Paul Waddell sets out a Borgesian array of disparate and seemingly unrelated images. There is a father changing his infant son's diaper in Waddell's studio. We see the huge mustachioed face of a man with an eye patch and a wide-eyed parasite on or near him. There are clusters of several earth-like planets arranged curiously close to each other in space. There are unidentified billionaires and various florae. There are dinosaurs and fragments of wondrous landscapes. And there is a massive vertiginous interior that feels like an antechamber to the afterlife. Yet for all the heterogeneity of subjects, a feeling of narrative relatedness connects the paintings; a sense that billionaires are more related to dinosaurs than we would imagine, that a strange high-climbing potted plant and planetary formations communicate with one other, intimately, directly, but also with and through landscapes and babies and their diaper changing fathers. And that what we see in Paul Waddell's paintings is what they are saying. That by looking at them and contemplating them we become and are their translative, communicative mechanism at work.
In BEAT-A-RETREAT Paul Waddell gives us many things to look at and to contemplate. A survey of things and their types prompts us to look deeply into our past and our present by way of a singular visual poetics. Waddell describes his process this way:
Varnish is a way to make a lens out of goo, that light can travel through and make colors glow. Oil paint is good for describing decadent meaty flesh. The common graphite pencil captures and describes the incomprehensible scale of planets in space while bringing to human imaginative scale the doodle in a school notebook during class or lecture. Tearing huge watercolor paintings within the framework of performance art can provide a mark making tool in multidisciplinary practice, emulating tangents and arcs of energies and actions and enacting in personal and social theatre the surprising confluence of all things in the known and unknown universe.