FIGURE 14

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Graphite and collaged colored paper

SURREAL ABSTRACTION

PAUL DALLAS

This project originated from several key sources. The first is the work of the Armenian American artist Arshile Gorky. Completed in the time between the end of Surrealism and the rise of Abstract Expressionism, Gorky’s paintings are highly imaginative hybrids. The second source for the project is the city itself. I have lived in New York since June 2001, and my architectural education and experience of the city have been colored as much by the landscape of disaster as by the landscape of recovery. Now that we are also embroiled in a war, the fear of impending violence has become forever linked in my mind to the urban condition.

These drawings evoke an interior land scape—a place between dream and awakening—filled with unease. An invented vocabulary of shape and form inhabit the stagelike space of the page. The chosen biomorphic forms are formally alluring and open up the possibility for wildly different associations. Above all, they hold a strange familiarity that references living forms at many different scales.

At first I worked loosely, incorporating automatic writing techniques for formfinding and developing “all-over” compositions. Later I created highly charged scenes composed of fewer elements. These pieces describe tense interactions between several biomorphic “characters.” One formal device that remained constant was the elimination of a ground plane—the characters hover ambiguously within the frame of the page. While the imagery has a sinister edge, there is a great deal of humor that can be found underneath.

The medium of powdered graphite was ideal, creating atmospheric space that emphasized texture and edge. I chose to work primarily in black and white; color was used sparingly to create visual impact and to counterpoint the soft smoky grays and thick blacks of graphite. Unlike the black and white forms, which were sculpted out of graphite, the collaged color forms were literally cut out and thus have different physicality.