Jack Barrett Gallery is pleased to present A Nearer Sun, an exhibition of new paintings by Paul Rouphail.

With clouds that billow and flags that waft, the kinetic potential of paintings by Paul Rouphail refuse to sit squarely within the category of still lifes. Without overdetermined messages, the images are unwilling to serve as future premonitions, while furthermore, also are not didactic illustrations of the past. Rather, the scenes bear witness to phenomenons from within an elongated present moment — depicting subtle warning signs of natural and political threats that churn. Suggesting an advancement toward looming catastrophes, viewers are trapped in suspended moments, anxiously awaiting an approaching verdict. While the works offer a chance to pause and meditate on the weight of such political realism, time closes in on opportunities to conceptualize possible escapes. 

Sampling objects and settings from the artists’ previous exhibitions, A Nearer Sun is notably not bound by an apparent subject but rather an ambient mood. Their melancholic tone has the hallmarks of a distinctly American malaise of being caught within a foil of disempowered citizenship and political ambivalence. As the medium of painting affords a distance of removal, the works direct our gaze at truths that are hard to see — such as mistaking alienation for personal freedom or obscuring the possibility of collective well-being with excessive aspirations for individual liberty. 

One exception to the exhibition’s return to previous subjects is an introduction of flags to Rouphail’s visual lexicon. In ‘Neighbor’, a Punisher flag hangs from a wooden banister echoing Diego Velasquez’s 1632 ‘Crucified Christ’ in tone, scale, and compounded theatrical space while inferring America’s spiritual underpinnings. Embodying chaos, aggression, and destruction, the fictional character of the Punisher is a former American Marine who wields an individual interpretation of the law by doling out violence at his own discretion. The benign comic book character’s symbol transforms into a nefarious icon when adopted by those entrusted to uphold and enforce the laws of nation-states. Hiding in plain sight, the coded archetype, not unlike Christ, is employed as both an announcement of identity and a sliding symbol used to reveal and conceal motives. 

Again using flags as devices to observe meaning from a remove, ‘Friday Afternoon in a Municipal Building’ frames a windowed view of the Philadelphia Police Headquarters adorned with a row of international flags at half-mast under a weighty, entropic sky. The international tragedy, however, is left to the viewer’s imagination. Global anxieties are scaled to the individual psyche in ‘Suncatcher’, in which the climate crisis, depicted through the orange-lit smoke of an immanent fire, has quite literally arrived home. 

Returning to food and drink to further prod bodily limits and agitation, ‘Lunch Time’ cynically encourages excessive consumption, ‘Dark Beer’ straddles a thin line between enticement and repulsion, and ‘Energy Drink in Contrapposto’ presents an aluminum vessel under glowing mammatus clouds positioned as a body twisting in the classical pose that both conceals and reveals. A singular moment of magical realism enters the exhibition in ‘Tomato Soup’ as a strange momentum mysteriously swirls a bowl of soup’s liquid vortex in a counter-clockwise spiral, throwing any assumed realism or access to Truth and Knowledge into question.

– Marie Heilich

Paul Rouphail (b. 1987, Chicago, IL) lives and works in Philadelphia, PA. He received his BFA from Carnegie Mellon University, and his MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design. Recent solo exhibitions include The Passenger, Stems Gallery, Brussels (2021); Future Machine, Jack Barrett, New York (2020. Recent group exhibitions include Galerie Sultana, Paris; Smart Objects, Los Angeles, CA; Nicelle Beauchene Gallery, Fisher Parrish Gallery, George Adams Gallery, Nancy Margolis Gallery, and Microscope Gallery, New York, NY; Fjord Gallery and Little Berlin, Philadelphia, PA; The Miller ICA at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA; and White Columns online. Rouphail's work has been reviewed online and in print, including the Contemporary Art Review Los Angeles, Artspace, New American Paintings, Maake Magazine, and Gestalten Press' Imagine Architecture, among others.