In her review for December 27, 2018 for the Republican-American she writes..."The Mattatuck Museum’s small exhibit “Convergence: Meditations on American Landscapes,” tries to explore the way that landscape tradition has affected contemporary artists. The answer, if this exhibit is any indication, is not entirely well. The seven contemporary artists on display play with the technologically driven, ordered and synthetic culture as it riffs on the ideals of the Romantic era. Curator Jennifer Terzian says she chose these artists for the way they “explore unexpected ways of responding to the scientific rationalization of nature that perpetuated and defined the Romantic era.”
In regard to Paiement she says "All of that, in Smolinski’s images, has been laid waste by our own manic need for connection – of the cellular kind. His best work in the exhibit, “Dead Pine Horizon,” takes aim at the phony pine tree cell phone towers that look about as much like the real thing as those aluminum Christmas trees of the 1960s resemble an Easter white pine. Spindly pines pierce the crepuscular sky, their limbs heavy with the enormous satellite dish that announces their falsity. So, too, with Paul Paiement, whose “Nexus – Grand Tetons, WY” clutters the image of forest with horrid orange and blue Plexiglas.Our organic landscapes are so obscured by the inorganic and environmentally ruinous, that we are as alien from nature as contemporary landscape is from 19th century Romanticism."
For the entire review please visit
