Before visiting Guillemette’s Downtown L.A. studio or his exhibition for Culver City’s Artwalk 2007, I had seen his work primarily on his website, www.pguillemetteart.com, an i-visit inspired when I saw something fab that he'd created mounted on a friend’s wall. The sculpture was a human head shape with a highly-detailed scaled, two-headed snake throughout. On the forehead there was a ceramic sunflower, and I found out later through a dialogue with Paul Guillemette that it actually spins!
The piece was terribly stunning. When I saw more of his work after my extended cyber-viewing, I was shocked. As is usually the case, the photographs could never do justice to the complexity and richness of his creative output. The texture, detail, color, and even lighting, as many of his pieces have light bulbs placed in them, made for both accessible and awe-inspiring artwork.
A versatile sculptor, Guillemette works with paint, resin, and ceramic, and my favorite pieces often include found objects. If there is any manner in which art can convey the current, both blatant and latent themes of our culture, it is through found objects. In fact, a hot hit with a lot of the ladies at the Culver City gallery exhibit was a headlining piece called “Kiss Me You Talk Too Much,” a silhouette of a couple for which one of the bodies was a collection of found objects. Many of the objects were loaded with allusions to courtship, sexuality, and constructions of femininity, the body as a space in which there is health and sickness, and also societal forces in the external and increasingly industrial and technological world. In other words, eye candy, fo’ sho’.
For someone who can’t drop up to twelve-grand on a sculpture, I love Guillemette’s clothing design most. Guillemette fashions prints primarily on basic cotton pieces that Urban Outfitter’s would kill to produce. An intersection between fine art and attire, fashion is Guillemette’s most widely accessible medium. Who wouldn’t love little green men on their undies? If only they’d come to life and move around inside your trousers...
Guillemette’s prints on t-shirts and button-downs alike you may easily spot on people getting in and out of their cars in the cooler confines of our gridlocked city (or hopefully finding them on your floor in the morning), and you can request these fab articles via online contact with my favorite, Los Angeles-based artiste at www.pguillemetteart.co,.
