Essay by art critic Lilly Wei

Excerpts, catalog essay

Paul Vazquez is a gifted artist shaped by Abstract Expressionism and Pop art, with plenty of other modernist tropes in his vocabulary. As might be expected, he is an ardent advocate of both painting and drawing, often “drawing” his paintings as well as painting them and vice versa…

Both of Vazquez’ styles dance to their own rhythms which partner each other nicely, part of the dialectic he establishes between drawing and painting,  figuration and geometry, black and white and color, solid and space, arrest and movement…

Vazquez is also an ardent advocate of life, as we might also expect. A well traveled man, he has inserted into his paintings one way or another all the places he has seen that have touched him. As well, people, art, buildings, trees, flowers and other objects have been serendipitously co-opted. The results are fanciful canvasses, brimful of joie de vivre and fragmented autobiography – with a nod to Matisse and Lichtenstein. In a Vazquez painting, it is the present that is vividly, timelessly before us…

A seasoned improviser, Vazquez has long trusted his instincts with happy results…