Tip of the Hat brings together editions published by Paulson Fontaine Press that nod to influential artists and works from art history. Hernan Bas offers an updated exploration of “The Nightmare,” one of the most provocative paintings of the Romantic era, created by Henry Fuseli. Kota Ezawa recreates The Last Sitting by Bert Stern in his signature, reductive style. David Huffman pulls trees from the backgrounds of Nicolas Poussin paintings and situates them next to his iconic basketball pyramids. Kerry James Marshall is in direct conversation with Rococo painters such as François Boucher, Jean-Honoré Fragonard, and Jean-Antoine Watteau, as he continues to create a “counter-archive” that refuses the invisibility of Black figures in Western pictorial traditions. Editions by Henry Taylor take influence from the Still Life paintings of Max Beckmann and the interiors of painter Édouard Vuillard.
Hernan Bas is known for his ornate figurative paintings that explore identity, sexuality, and subjectivity. Influenced by romanticism and gothic literature, Bas’s work marries the lush, introspective, and preternatural stylistic tropes of these genres with his own observations of humanity. Bas often blurs the lines between realityand fantasy, questioning the distinction between the two. His paintings present dark, often humorous narratives grounded by his masterful technical skills, immense art historical knowledge, and sharp wit. Paulson Fontaine Press is happy to announce the release of four new, large-scale editions with Bas: Nightmare (blue); Nightmare (mood ring); Nightmare (red); Nightmare (yellow), inspired by Henry Fuseli’s 1781 painting, The Nightmare.
Paulson Fontaine Press is happy to present new releases by Derek Fordjour and Greg Rick.
Derek Fordjour makes paintings, sculptures, and installations in which exuberant visual materiality gives rise to portraits and other multilayered compositions. Fordjour’s tableaux are filled with athletes, performers, and others who play key roles in cultural rituals and communal rites of passage. In his paintings, Fordjour methodically constructs the ground of each composition through a collage-based process involving cardboard, newspaper, and other materials and pigments. The varied and textural surfaces that emerge are as complex—and physically engaging—as the dynamic subjects that Fordjour inscribes on top, within, and through them.
Greg Rick makes powerful paintings that delve into archetypal explorations of human nature. His rhythmic works writhe with movement, blurring lines between history painting and abstraction. Like Guston’s pile-ups, Rick compresses gesture and form to provoke ideas of struggle, confrontation, and transcendence. While mining his personal experiences with the 101st Airborne, he joins a long tradition of artists like Picasso, Goya, and Léger who used paint to mourn the spoils of war.
The writer and historian Wallace Stegner called national parks “The best idea we ever had. Absolutely American, absolutely democratic, they reflect us at our best rather than our worst.” At a time when these public spaces are being threatened, and protests are erupting across the country, this iconic quote takes on new importance and meaning.
In response, this exhibition presents a selection of etchings that are depictions of nature and wilderness. Included are works by Hernan Bas, Isca Greenfield-Sanders, Lonnie Holley, Chris Johanson, Caroline Kent, Kerry James Marshall and Shaun O’Dell.
When Henry Taylor arrived at the Paulson Fontaine Press studio earlier this year, he was met with much anticipation. It had been five years since I stood in front of Taylor’s work at the Venice Biennale in 2019. I was at the Arsenale, transfixed by a large triptych measuring about 7 x19 feet. The first panel was a portrait of Toussaint Louverture, the leader of the Haitian Revolution. The second was a painted replica of the artist Glenn Ligon’s text painting titled, “Remember the Revolution #1”, 2004 from his series dedicated to Richard Pryor’s stand-up routines. And lastly, was a painting based on a photograph of mourners at the funeral for Carol Robertson, a victim of the 1963 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama.
This piece perfectly encapsulated Taylor’s breadth of view, showcasing his deep concern with American and art history, the universal grappling with mourning and loss, and the dark humor developed to cope with these human experiences and conditions.
In 2020, we began a discussion about making prints together, and since then, the momentum of Henry Taylor: B Side has taken the world by storm. Henry Taylor: B Side is the largest exhibition of Taylor’s work to date and it traveled from MOCA, Los Angeles to The Whitney Museum in New York, surveying thirty years of his work in painting, drawing, sculpture, and installation.
Fast forward to 2024. When Taylor first arrived at the press, he began experimenting with sugarlift by painting portraits of our team and it was a beautiful icebreaker. In the words of Alicia Keys, “When Henry walks into a room, he lights up the whole space.” With the energy you might expect from viewing his style of mark making, he experimented with soapground, spitbite, softground, and drypoint. Ultimately, it was the immediacy of the positive mark provided by sugarlift that Taylor ran with. Over the course of the next week, he created a self-portrait, revisited a painting of his late mother and his daughter, and started a piece based on a photo he had taken years ago of a group of men on the streets of downtown L.A. In the print titled History is Everywhere, Taylor pays tribute to Huey P. Newton and the city of Oakland where he took his first printmaking class at Laney college in the late 70’s.
One day in the studio, after a conversation at lunch about the state of the world, Henry asked if we had a plunger and proceeded to paint it with the words, “It about to Go Down.” During a second visit to the studio in August, inspired by painter Max Beckmann, he rendered a gorgeous still life of a bouquet of roses we had placed in the studio on his behalf. It’s this voracious vacillation that makes his work so exciting and compelling.
The writer Zadie Smith wrote about Taylor, “If it has been the tendency of African-American artists to stray heedlessly over academic borders and genre demarcations (rap is popular poetry; jazz produces improvised symphonies; gospel is the sexual sacred), then Taylor is firmly grounded in the African-American aesthetic tradition. His greatest subject is human personality, although in his portraits, personality is not a matter of literal representation but rather a vibe, a texture, a series of vertical block colors laid out on a horizontal plane. This restates the obvious fact that seeing is never objective, but the intense level of empathy we meet with in Taylor’s portraits, especially between the artist and his African-American subjects, determines everything we see from brushstroke to framing to gaze.”
Henry Taylor is one of the most significant artists of his generation, and we are honored to publish ten new editions introducing his first major print project.
