7 am Painting

by: Josiah Gagosian | ArtVoice magazine, March 2010 Edition In Quebec City in the winter of 1969 a fifteen-year-old boy stole away from his parents' house in the night and made his way to the new Grand Theatre. Catalan-born artist, Jordi Bonet was at work there on a massive three thousand square foot relief mural. He had only one arm and suffered from leukemia but in his relatively short life he was able to generate many important large-scale works in metal and concrete using innovative techniques and textures. As he labored there in the frigid weather that year, slathering the wall with concrete, the boy watched his every move. While others his age might have snuck out at night hoping to get into trouble, this boy was different. Bonet's dedication and energy inspired him to take up painting himself and so another significant Quebecois artist was born, Andre Paradis, an artist who developed a similar interest in texture, though he would use it to very different ends. His father was an amateur cabinetmaker, who helped to further encourage his son's artistic interest, by sharing his workshop with the newborn painter. Paradis' artistic education and growth would turn out to be an investigational process, which is still evident in his ongoing mixed media explorations of landscape. Andre Paradis' landscapes are balanced textural renderings of mostly natural settings divested of their minutiae in order to amplify the effect of light and color. Instead of delicately rendered details like branches, blades of grass, or leafy shadows, Paradis uses vivid colors and various media from recycled glass to acrylic, copper, gold, and silver to convey the sentiment of a landscape. Much of his inspiration is drawn from the places he has traveled, particularly the Caribbean and Central America with their vibrant, tropical hues. Paintings with titles like Jungla and El Dorado conjure up images of colonial Latin America, a Latin America in which the land itself is gilded in the artist's adaptation. Having lived also in the South of France, Paradis infuses much of his work with the kind of light he experienced in the winters there, which he says has a very specific, indefinable quality. "I want to transmit something that has a more positive feeling than a dark feeling," he says, further emphasizing the significance of light in his work.