Native Charlottean and acclaimed fine artist Paul Rousso has large pieces on permanent display in Bobcats Arena, the Charlotte Convention Center and the Mecklenburg County Aquatic Center
Act I:
Meeting Rousso It’s a rare snow day in Charlotte; sleet is falling, and everything is closed except some private schools and Uptown Magazine. “Like the post office,” my editor assures me in his you-better-be-awake phone call on his way to pick me up for our interview with Paul Rousso (who is also open--is always open, I’ll soon find out). At the moment, though, I know nothing about Rousso, haven’t even Googled him yet. I had a gut feeling that under prepared would be the way to go in meeting the Paul Rousso, and I was right. Rousso is quite possibly the only human being who can convey more information in one hour than that same hour of Internet browsing would yield. From the moment we met, our conversation spanned corporate art, gallery art, creative art, Rousso’s career, his passions and breakthroughs, his frustrations, his philosophy on art, his take on life, and his particular slice of the American pie—and I’m sure I’ve left some things out. And I didn’t need questions written down in advance.
Rousso is perhaps most well known for his big art, though his even bigger personality certainly upstages that and is the reason I cringe to open with a discussion of his corporate art. He renders giant company portraits using a mural technique he designed for the occasion, capturing the whole goings-on of a corporation and splashing it across a giant installation. He was most recently commissioned by Leon Levine, head of the Family Dollar business that had the Levines on the Forbes ‘400 richest Americans’ list for four consecutive years.
“It’s massive. It portrays all the things the company does as if it’s all going on at once and gives it depth.” Rousso is out of his seat, speaking along with large hand gestures, and pulling proofs of this project or that to show off his layered, painted mural designs. In minutes, I start to get a sense of the time involved, the attention to detail, the artistic vision.
He explains how his “gallery art” earlier in his career was the predecessor to this kind of work. He created mural-like, sarcastic scenes of “the American Dream, the party regular folks aren’t invited to,” but wished he could reach into the collage and move the color around. He wanted to push the images in a way painting on canvas wouldn’t allow. Rousso continued to experiment with this extremely time-consuming process until he was forced by the common concerns of putting food on the table to move past just paint and canvas. As Rousso has found many times in his career, ingenuity is often its own reward. He discovered a way to print digital images and put the paper to canvas, then over-paint to manipulate the scene. This provided the artistic control he had lacked, turning his fingers into paintbrushes themselves, his prints into brushstrokes—Rousso will go so far as to say—while allowing him to churn out pieces of even greater size in less time. You could argue that Rousso is Charlotte’s most prolific artist in terms of square footage; he has humongous pieces at places including Bobcats Arena and the Charlotte Convention Center, as well as various corporate headquarters.
But it’s these large-scale projects that Rousso feels have made him virtually ostracized in the fine art world. He points out that when there is a “real” art event in Charlotte, you won’t find his work displayed in it.
“I’ve been categorized as a corporate artist. Creative Loafing even made a category for me, ‘Best Commercial Fine Artist,’ which I feel exemplifies the perception people have of you once you are doing art for others, you no longer ‘belong’ in a gallery.” I liken it to the age-old accusation of selling out and ask Rousso if there might be another interpretation since his corporate gigs certainly seem to present artistic challenges.
“Exactly, that’s how I survive, mainly, is by solving problems.” Rousso makes it clear he isn’t limited to collage. He is adept at graphic design, identity marketing, ad conception, and digital design. “Across the board of visual talent, I can produce it.” His latest project is launching a new line of tequilas from Charlotte-based importer Extraodinario Brands. Rousso had a hand in naming the tequilas, Xtraodinario and Tradicion Azul, and also in designing the bottles, labels and marketing materials. He admits that he has to serve as an art director on these types of jobs, to shift into being a professional who considers his clients’ needs, rather than making art for art’s sake. He also makes it clear he would hands-down prefer the luxury of doing art only for art’s sake and certainly hasn’t given up this aspect of his creative self.
“My work (and by the gleam in his eye, the shift of his brow, the weighing down of his demeanor, it’s clear he’s speaking of his art) is about the progression of art.” And before we go on, you might have noticed this interview began with Act I, a technique used in anticipation that this might be the first interview I’ve written that could perhaps require an intermission. If you’re not sitting down yet, do so, or grab some water. Paul Rousso is just getting started.
Act II:
Rousso Theory
Around 1978, the National Endowment of Arts came into all its glory and started doling out grants and funds based on things like written applications and scholarly presentations. To grab attention to one’s project, a process of oneupping a rival’s tragic circumstances was put into motion. Applications for art funds began to detail heritage, inequality, suffering, battles with addiction, personal struggle, and the importance that a particular artist’s work would shed on these universal themes. Fine art became about the expression of inner themes, about a reflection of experience. While Rousso feels these methods of creating art are certainly important, they shouldn’t be so to the exclusion of art that is not about the artist but about the art. This trend stopped what he sees as the logical progression of painting. Yes, that’s what Rousso says. The logical progression of painting was stopped. Rousso then launches into a most condensed history of art to explain his position. People used to paint three-dimensional scenes on two-dimensional canvas, using paint to create an illusion of reality (a mountain that is clearly in the background of the life scene is painted in the same plane as the girl standing in the foreground, e.g.). Picasso and others (names whizzing by my ears too fast to catch) come along and take the threedimensional figure and flatten it, making art in geometric pieces.
According to Rousso, this flattening was a major bullet point in the history of painting. Then, the pop artists including Warhol and his contemporaries started just painting flat things, labels and flags, doing away with the whole 3-D conversion problem altogether, painting 2-D in 2-D.
Rousso sees all this as a logical progression, a natural course of art, but wonders what’s next? In fact, he wants to “fill the space” between then (when painting stopped) and now and doesn’t mind being on a one-man quest.
“Since I was eight I’ve been trying to be an important artist, a great artist, and to do that is to blaze your own trail.” So, at 25, Rousso took up seriously looking for a response to flattening, believing that there is “something floating around called quality which is not as subjective as art that comes from the heart” and determined to find it. His method? Let’s skip through twenty years or so of exploration and bodies of work and start when Rousso starting staring at crumpled pieces of paper for hours. Then, he began doing paintings of said crumpled paper. The logic (dare I assign the word) is taking a two-dimensional object (sheet of paper) and abstracting it to 3-D. Still, he was only creating a visual illusion of depth. Next, he took the crumpled pieces of paper and glued them to a board, creating figurative artwork that is both abstract and 3-D.
At this point, Rousso says he could feel it, taste it, was on the cusp of the next major breakthrough in the progression of art as form. He took the entire Bible, a 3-D object, and took each page out, pasted it in order on a board. Same for the yellow pages, in order. Neat, sure, taking a 3-D everyday object and not painting it, but painting with it: object as paint. But still, simply an inversion of what he was really up to, which he then discovered: paint as object. Rousso is nearly jumping up and [ rousso’s “captain marvel” ] down now; he is, actually on his tiptoes, arms swaying as balances.
“Never before has two-dimensional paint been a three-dimensional object. So I started painting the painting, taking paint as a two-dimensional substance and layering it until it’s like I’ve reached into the painting and pulled out the colors, sculpted it.” The results are these creations of pure paint that Rousso then mounts to a door for display purposes. He’s afraid I don’t get it. “It’s actually a hunk of paint, shit-gallons of paint!” We all take a breath. I hesitate to ask the question I know I must.
So, how is this newest work being received?
Rousso, however, does not hesitate. “It’s not getting noticed, can you imagine?” He discusses how the art world is in a different place today than in the past, how in previous generations any artist who was as “far out there” as he would at least be taken seriously. But that now he’d have to be entrenched in a particular, legitimized art world to get due attention and be able to focus, instead of having to keep himself afloat through his various art-related design jobs and corporate projects. Then he turns this full-throttled intensity on me; what would I choose if forced to: being famous and profitable, or going down as a great?
In the moment I thought of my writing. I thought of big contracts and bank accounts against being taught to future generations, and letters from everyday people saying words made a difference. “Longevity,” I answered directly into his eager gaze. “I’d want to be known as important.” Rousso nodded as if I’d passed some kind of test.
“When I was a boy I decided I was going to be the greatest artist alive, and at 49 I still haven’t stopped. I don’t know of anyone who has such an aptitude on so many levels. I’m a master technician. Yet very few people are interested in my work. Locally, I’ve garnered perhaps the most press and high profile jobs of any artist in the last twenty years, but no one knows who I am.” His expression is now crazed. “Don’t you find that fascinating?”
Act III:
Life After Rousso ‘Fascinating’ is an apt description, a complex paradigm of power, prestige, talent, ego, history, relevance, and dreams. I don’t dare venture an opinion as to whether Rousso’s assessments are accurate. My knowledge of painting leaves me a vastly inadequate judge. But my time with Rousso has led me to a different answer to his question, to hope for an altogether different possibility for artists who choose to create in whatever forms inspire them. My answer is not one or the other, but both. Why not have art live in the present and the future, allowing it to support its makers during their lifetime as well as informing the future?
~ Celina Mincey
To experience Paul Rousso’s fine art visit paulrousso.com
His commissioned works can be viewed at roussoportfolio.com |
