For 50 years, artist Paul Binai has been capturing the feeling of the subject
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"Gehenna I" by Paul Binai (1997). -
Paul Binai in his studio in Indiana, Pa., in 2003 -
"Self Portrait" by Paul Binai. (oil on canvas, 32 x 30 in., 1962-63) -
"Olga and Tatiana" by Paul Binai. (oil on canvas, 50 x 60 in., 1981) -
"Travesti (Man in Rose Chemise)" by Paul Binai. (oil on canvas, 36.5 x 30.5 in., 1966)
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Paul Binai is an observer, historian, curator and aesthete, qualities that have informed him as an artist but also kept him cloistered from the world of big art which builds reputation.
That makes for a refreshing purity of vision -- uncompromising some would say -- but the loss is that his evocative work isn't better known outside select art circles here, and in New York City and France, where he has gallery representation.
The exhibition, "Paul Binai: Fifty-Year Retrospective," at the University Museum, Indiana University of Pennsylvania, is a well-deserved recognition of his achievements, ranging from his earliest painting to a sampling of the collage work he's turned to in more recent years.
"Blue Shutters" of 1952 was Mr. Binai's first painting. The scantily dressed women peering out a window at night was provocative due to its subject matter but also due to its representational quality at a time when Abstract Expressionism was in ascendency.
The painting was completed after Mr. Binai, then 19, read Truman Capote's "Other Voices, Other Rooms," which included a transvestite who stood before a window wearing women's clothes. The artist was trying to "convey the feeling of Southern decadence," he told Brenda Mitchell, an IUP associate professor of art history who wrote the exhibition catalog essay.
Capturing the "feeling" of the subject -- the emotive quality that resides within and defines it -- continues through Mr. Binai's oeuvre, in later years playing out in spectacular color associations that seduce the eye even before the often shattering scene becomes apparent.
If Mr. Binai wasn't following the contemporaneous fashion of abstraction, he was way ahead of the multicultural curve because of his rather exotic personal history, recorded in the show's informative, illustrated catalog.
His paternal grandfather was the Siamese (now Thai) ambassador to Germany and the Imperial Court of Russia before 1900, and his paternal grandmother was one of the first women admitted to the medical profession in Europe. His father, Prayong Pamon Montri, was born in Berlin in 1898, spent part of his childhood in Moscow, then relocated with his twin brother to Siam where the King adopted them.
First Published November 16, 2011 12:00 am
