Zürcher Studio is very happy to announce Paul DeMuro’s first solo show at our New York gallery. His densely applied, large-scale oil paintings confront technology as well as the medium of painting itself.

By the sole means of painting, Paul DeMuro’s art exerts a real fascination. The eye is drawn into a heterogeneous space that forms a “screen” to representation: images of screens referring only to themselves; bright images composed of empty screens. But the emptiness is constructed in depth. And the light originates in the depth of the painting itself. This quasi-sculptural addition of relief inevitably recalls Rauschenberg’s Combine Paintings; but here the heterogeneous elements are absent, because the painting itself, in the paradoxical exercise of representation without object, works visually as a mirror. The painted framing emphasizes this. Inscribed in the picture, it induces a false perspective. Here, painting attains its most tactile dimension, which at times is explicitly reinforced by shapes of hands. These “negative” hands like those of prehistoric paintings remind one of the rayograph by Man Ray enclosed in The Kiss (1922). But if a picture by DeMuro were to be compared to a mirror, it would be the Grimm brothers’ “magic” two-way mirror, that reflects only some of the light it receives, and lets the rest through. Thus marking the separation of an incident ray into two beams, one reflected, the other refracted. It is through traces of such refractions that he reveals a mysterious connection with the intimacy behind the screen – that of the computer or the iPhone.

Through an intuitive use of color in relief, DeMuro seeks to place the human hand in a nexus with the machine. According to John Yau: “Hearts, cupids, rainbows and hands – DeMuro incorporates visual clichés into his work, but he never becomes sentimental, kitschy or ironic. This is just one of the remarkable things about his work. His precise synthesis of the tactile and the optical is another. It’s as if he wishes that computers would manifest themselves physically, becoming something more than a screen we both touch and take for granted”

Paul DeMuro (born 1981, he lives in Brooklyn, NY) was raised in Philadelphia. He received his MFA in Painting from Rutgers University in 2010. He obtains the Purchase Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He currently holds a Chashama studio residency in New York.

Selected exhibitions : 2012 Revelations, Zürcher Studio, New York, NY ; Techno Nature, Zürcher Studio, New York, NY ; Broken Window Plane, Tracy Williams ltd, New York, NY ; Rutgers MFA Open Studios, Mason Gross, New Brunswick, NJ ; Mythografia, Bull and Ram, New York, NY – 2011 Bleach (with Alex da Corte), Jolie Laide, Philadelphia, PA ; In Between the Sheets, Harlem Workspace Gallery, New York, NY ; Exprist, Columbia University, New York, NY – 2010 De-Nature*, Jolie Laide, Philadelphia, PA ; Off The Map, White Box, New York, NY. *solo exhibitions