First Friday Opening Reception: October 1, 2010, 6-9 p.m.
Golden Rule Gallery, 811 E. Burnside, Suite 122, Portland, OR 97214
Show runs September 28th through October 31st

Closing Reception and Golden Rule Halloween Costume Party: Saturday, October 30th, 7-10 p.m.
Picture
'Alien Trio,' by Paula Keyth (2010). Acrylic on panel, 31 x 35 inches
ARTIST STATEMENT

Paula Keyth’s work is alchemical in the most basic sense: it is a transmutation, a transubstantiation. In her work, feline and human and piscine forms go hybrid; shapes shift, comingle, or sublime from ether; figure becomes abstraction and vice versa. Even as forms fold themselves into the indeterminate space of the painting, ghostly images and textures reveal themselves from beneath its surface. In the world opened out through Keyth’s paintings, essences are fragile, subject to drastic and important revisions. It is as if The Tempest’s Caliban and Airiel had merged into a single vision of being: at once terrifying lightness and hunched, ruined earth.

The figures in Keyth’s paintings are shapes that emerge only in the dark; she is haunted by creatures that appear as different degrees of shadow, or as emissaries between shadow and light. They exist either between the two, as in a Caravaggio painting, or emerge fully fleshed—as do Goya’s later daymares—from an alternate, abstracted world just beneath the objective and visible. Just as in dreams and hypnagogic states, Keyth’s figurations are a manifestation of emotional states every bit as fragile as their physical existence: each transient state of being is equally possible and impossible, a stepchild of magical thinking.

So in “Birds of Paradise” the birds are bound not only to each other but to the landscape that created them, which is every bit as difficult to escape as any prison. In “Shapeshifters” no shape seems at home but rather is always transitory, always in some state of unconscious, unanticipated becoming. Her “Blue Ether Acrobats” reveal themselves, in spirit, as the virtuous unbelievers in Dante’s Limbo, condemned forever to float.

Much like the painter Chaim Soutine, Keyth exists as a bridge between pure abstract expressionism and figurative work, except that the transition here is reversed: Keyth began as a purely abstract expressionist painter whose work evolved into saturated, though always frustrated concretion. Her meaty palette of reds and yellows exists as a physical force unto itself, at once a constraint and the source of work's own specific gravity, that from its maelstrom gives birth to the whole earthy, unearthly host that becomes its primary substance.

Keyth grew up in England and New York before studying music and painting in San Francisco, Rome, and Portland. Somewhere in the middle she went a little insane. She also teaches art history.

Picture
Paula Keyth and selected paintings, 2007-2009.
Picture
'Blue Ether Actobats,' by Paula Keyth (2010). Acrylic on panel, 34 1/2 x 24 1/2 inches
All pieces, including installations, are viewable for sale at Golden Rule Gallery, 811 E. Burnside, Suite 122, Portland, OR. 97214, T-SUN, 12-6 p.m., or by appointment. For additional information and pricing contact Wynde Dyer at (503) 863-1545.
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