Paul Insect

Allouche Gallery is thrilled to present Seeyou, an upcoming solo exhibition featuring a collection of new paintings by the British artist, Paul Insect.

A London based artist who originally hails from south-east England, Paul's distinct artistic style is a mesmerizing interplay of revelation and obscurity, urging viewers to contemplate their subjectivity in a society marked by constant streams of information.

A true mix media artist, Insect has worked with painting, screen printing, video, performance, and sculptures from found and discarded objects. For his new show, Seeyou, Paul has used a clever mix of painted wall fragments that hint at his street art roots, along with a range of large paintings on canvas and smaller works on wood panels.

Paul Insect first became known for his graphic work in the 90's and as one of London’s original street art trailblazers. With his collective 'Insect', Paul started creating flyers for clubs in London, working with the print house 'Pictures on Walls,’ while creating artwork for various music labels and musicians. He then broke out as a solo artist with his first show in 2007 'Bullion' in London's Soho, which was entirely bought-out by Damien Hirst before the opening. The show cleverly featured piles of gold bullion bars with bites taken out of them. Since then, Paul's honest visual language has become ubiquitous in the contemporary art scene — his meticulously hand painted raster dots create a pixelated effect on his subjects whose details are obscured by large bold shapes and protruding ears. In doing so, he is able to manipulate the viewer’s perspective, to hide certain parts of his subject’s faces while revealing others. In a world marked by self-representation and identity riddled anxiety, Insect finds power and meaning in his universe of anonymous figures.

In Seeyou Paul continues to develop his aesthetic language, cutting and cropping portraits with distant gazes from different angles, while expanding or distorting features. Insect's work is in part inspired by his screen printing and graphic design roots, create a trompe l'oeil painted photocopy effect. Through this process, Insect is able to access that funny feeling that can best be described as recovering a damaged old photograph - at once familiar and uncanny, but always joyful.

Paul Insect has had solo shows at a number of galleries and cities around the world, including but certainly not limited to: Amsterdam, Athens, Paris, LA, New York, London and Singapore. A longtime friend and collaborator of Banksy, he has worked alongside him at events such as The Cans Festival, Dismaland, and the Santa's Ghetto project's. Paul has also created large-scale installations at the Glastonbury Festival in England, including the iconic 'Rainbowman', an 8 meter-tall sculpture, now a permanent feature at the Festival. He is also known for his collaborations with the late NYC artist Bäst, mixing performance art with puppetry on video. The puppets were crafted from found and discarded objects over a period of 10 years, with many of the characters referencing street culture, celebrities and cartoons. The puppets were featured at Banksy's 'Dismaland, and have become a fixture of Paul's work. Insect has exhibited four years in a row at Roger Gastman’s massive traveling art show 'Beyond the Streets;' this year, Paul showed at the Saatchi Gallery in London, with a site specific installation named 'Rubbish Stuff:' a full size corner shop built in the gallery's main space. It was crafted to look as if it had been lifted from Paul's studio workshop in London and placed directly into the gallery. This was shown alongside a new series of works on canvas.