A blue forest, a fish flying through a living room, a foot on the moon, a lady coiffed with a bird, a white horse in the sky, a face, two faces, faces.
Paul Harmon's paintings strike with the immediacy of a bolt of lightning which might bruise the heart. Both playful and serious, it blends imagination and sensitivity.
Paul Harmon gives us canvases that sing and canvases that cry. Some give us back pieces of our collective history - the bomber of Hiroshima, the man on the moon - others awaken our private history - the poet's desperation, the melancholy of a woman floating over water.
He outlines his characters and his patterns with broken black lines as if to better define them but without ever making them definitive. At any moment they can escape through the free spaces that Paul Harmon leaves for them, like a chance to seize eternity. His colors are sometimes gentle to the point of tenderness, sometimes they are electric enough to emit a scream or a burst of joy.
And then the inserts in the work: a sudden detail enlarged until it dazzles, giving all its strength and truth to the painting. The man on the moon - it is the foot about to touch down; the poet's desperation - it is the face of a woman invading his space.
The inserts are frames placed where one would least expect them...yet, exactly where they should be.
The painting of Paul Harmon is resolutely contemporary without ever being trendy.
His techniques are those of photography, the cinema and the "bande dessinee" because of his frames, his inserts, and his superimpositions; yet, at the same time the work is a part of the post-impressionistic tradition. The painting of Paul Harmon makes the walls move, makes colors dance, makes the world sing like a photograph by Man Ray or a poem by Desnos.
Chinese Portrait of the Artist's Work
If it were a poem; Jacques Prevert
If it were a song: the Beatles
If it were a novel: Scott Fitzgerald
If it were a sculpture: Henry Moore
If it were a film: Wim Venders
If it were a painter: Paul Harmon
Monique Vacarisas, for L'Oeil Magazine, Paris