"Typically American" one may say at first glance...and then that becomes irrelevant. The main thing is the line, that extreme black tract that brings the color to life. Like a broken-up gesture that's been welded together, it gives the canvas perspective and depth.
The drawing's precision pulls one into a powerful intimacy. Nudes are dreaming, or so naturally abandoned, that they take one beyond the image. Smiling as at a gentle joke, armchairs look like still-lifes offering themselves to Old-World culture. Paul Harmon is fully conscious of the periods that bring about the styles, and his line gives a depth and relief from which it is hard to look away. The chairs resemble enthroned personages unchanged by the passage of time: the past has branded us. The more one enters the painting, the more the iron chair that we recall from our grandmother's flower beds takes on the erotic stance of a woman ready to give herself. Then the shadow becomes its double as the look reflects the soul, and if one waits longer, one wants to start talking to the chair. "Whom did you hold? Who fell asleep after a family repast in the spring sun? Who dreamed of another in the cool of a deep summer night? Who gave a violent kick?" One wants to continue with a whole series of delicate moments, or solemn instants, or times of deep sadness. These chairs are mute witnesses that, with Paul Harmon's line, take on the dimension of dreams that go to the very heart of the past.
By contrast, his nudes have the violence and pain of the night. Steeped in solitude and magic, one hesitates between dream and reality. Would to touch be obscene? We step into the boudoir, lift the curtain and admire the light that Paul Harmon can pass on to the electric blues, the reds, even the grays and greens. These colors are by their very nature opaque, but Harmon fills them with light.
This is done very simply by the line he surrounds with a halo, like that around the moon the night before a day of rain. The people of Lyons say, "Look, the moon's spreading". Poets say, "The moon in its halo lights up the melancholy night". Children say, "The moon is all scrambled up".
With his landscapes Paul Harmon takes one around the world. Without emphasis and free of form, one feels that one is in the midst of a "band dessinee", except when he treats a subject of limitless import. His "Black Venice" is absolutely fascinating, for he has steeped the grandeur of this city of light in the drama one encounters today. If we do not save Venice, it will be submerged in the depths of the lagoon. What will then be left? A few emergent domes, the Bridge of Sighs on the surface of the water. The whole legend will become a fossil; from the Fenice to the Florian, Saint Mark and its lions will be a mere idea of the Renaissance.
In Paul Harmon's work, time is an element that counts. He makes it stop by painting in a static way, as if he thought it passed too fast. To master time, he goes beyond it and that may be a key to his work.
Paul Harmon, steeped in his culture and in ours (he divides his life between France and the USA), has put the great masters of painting, music, and poetry into his work. From Baudelaire to Modigliani, from Modigliani to Matisse, he has found his own way. He has analyzed the works, and the syntheses of them, and found his own voice.
His work is unique as much by its force as by the tone he gives his style: humor, fantasy, rigor. Such paradoxes make Paul Harmon a major artist, whose work has a sensibility drawn from his own inner poetry.
Solange Yver de la Vigne-Bernard, Critic, Paris