Paul Housley’s paintings regularly animate the dialectics between the thinking, reflective artist and the frightened world in which he finds himself. His figures often feature solitary characters in environments that sometimes subsume them, and sometimes elide their subjectivity in a volatile accumulation of paint. In 'Empire of Light', 2024, the artist is seated on the floor of his chaotic workspace with his elbow resting on his knee in a pose that recalls the history of the genre. If the inspired painter grafting away in his studio has inspired artists as varied as Gustave Courbet, whose L’Atelier du peintre, 1855, depicted ‘the world’ (allegories of Academic Art, as well as Charles Baudelaire, Champfleury, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon) coming to visit the artist in Ornans, all the way to the revisions of Kerry James Marshall and his compositions of African-Americans as both subject and producer of the studio scene, then Housley, too, invites us into the solitary space of paint on canvas, paint on canvas. 'Empire of Light' might be more explicitly self-referential than many of his works, but it recalls his central themes: ‘of course all my work, and maybe all art, is about sex and death’, he tells me. All of Housley’s paintings have those stakes. They are about what it means to be alive, then and now. They are about what it means to be human, all too human.
Excerpt from Matthew Holman's long-form essay 'The English in Love' featuered in the new publication.
