Paul Abraham

Following in the footsteps of Pop Art Artists, I take my inspiration from the simplistic style of comics. I see it as an ideal medium to illustrate our social fantasies. A major theme of my work is the Judaeo-Christian bipolar values of good and evil. I investigate symbols and stereotypes. Like a charade, a play on images, I put on display paintings whose association brings to light the arch messages that our society forwards to us.

My work is rooted in Storytelling. I create fragments of stories, successive scenes or key images, snapshots caught in the movement of life. In the absence of a narrative temporal continuity, we feel nevertheless that there is a before and an after. I use comic’s syntax for its narrative capabilities, for its stylized and symbolic universal content. I developed a "pop art" visual language of my own. I initiated my pictorial research with two-dimensional renderings. Wishing to emphasize movement in my compositions, I quickly felt the need to get out of the frame, to give depth, to add the third dimension. In recent years I have been working on multimedia projects combining painting, sculpture and video. There is theatricality in my installations, a decor that reveals the stage artifice. My works convey my interpretation of the American symbolic space to which I juxtapose my European culture; open spaces, westerns, cinema, the good and the bad, superheroes and outlaws, ideology of the self made man, freedom, references to religion and the sacred.