Sabbatikal is pleased to present Evergreen, a solo exhibition by Paul Paiement bringing together a new body of paintings developed through repeated journeys across Idaho and Wyoming, alongside the debut of a new series of works on paper. Extending beyond the works themselves, the exhibition transforms the gallery through a site-specific installation, inviting viewers into the process through which landscape becomes architecture, architecture returns to landscape, and observation gives way to imagination.

Evergreen

At what point does looking become imagining?

There is a peculiar human tendency to look at an empty space and imagine what could be there. We find faces in clouds, figures among stars, boundaries where none exist. A mountain becomes a roofline. An open field suggests shelter. Long before anything is built, something has already begun to take shape.

Paul Paiement's paintings begin in this space between what exists and what could exist.

Over the course of summer and winter, Paiement traveled through Idaho, returning to remote landscapes as they changed with the seasons. He photographed places around Ketchum, Hailey, Bellevue, Alturas Lake, Quigley Pond and elsewhere throughout the region, extending his travels into nearby Wyoming. He sought places beyond developed areas, where roads begin to disappear and the landscape seems, at least momentarily, uninterrupted.

Yet Paiement does not look at these places in search of untouched nature. He looks for something that isn't there.

Back in his studio, Paiement searches architectural blueprints for structures whose lines recall the landscapes he has photographed. The slope of a mountain might become the pitch of a roof. A horizon might suggest a foundation. Architectural drawings for buildings that have yet to exist are paired with landscapes that already do.

The resulting paintings complicate which came first.

In Nexus – Colter Bay, Wyoming, a succession of mountain peaks seems to find its echo in the pitched architecture embedded within them. In Nexus – Alturas Lake, Idaho, the outline of another imagined structure rises vertically from a dense forest and quiet body of water, its architecture appearing at once foreign to the landscape and strangely at home within it. Elsewhere, the greens of Hailey and Ketchum give way to the snow-covered terrain of Nexus – Quigley Pond, Idaho. Across seasons and locations, Paiement returns to the same act of looking, finding correspondences between forms made by nature and those imagined by us.

Using architectural plans, Paiement creates shaped wooden panels whose silhouettes follow the geometry of buildings. Within them, landscapes are rendered with remarkable precision. As they move beyond the architectural boundary, however, representation begins to dissolve. Trees, mountains, sky and earth give way to thick accumulations of paint until landscape becomes material again.

The building becomes landscape. The landscape becomes building. And somewhere between the two, the distinction begins to feel increasingly artificial.

Alan Watts once observed that the separation of the artificial from the natural is itself an artificial distinction. A bird makes a nest. A bee makes a hive. A person makes a home. Each alters its surroundings according to its own nature.

Perhaps the more interesting question, then, is not whether human beings belong in nature, but why we have become so accustomed to imagining ourselves outside of it.

For the first time in Evergreen, Paiement approaches this question from the opposite direction.

In a new series of works on paper, Paiement strips his process back to its essential elements. Rather than beginning in an open landscape and imagining what might someday exist within it, he begins with a formalized architectural structure and imagines the landscape that might grow around it. Architecture comes first. Grasses gather at its edges. Cattails emerge beside carefully drawn walls. Nature is introduced sparingly, sometimes occupying only a fraction of an otherwise untouched sheet of paper.

The reversal is quiet but consequential. Where the paintings ask what might be built within a landscape, the works on paper ask what landscape might emerge around what has been built.

Neither feels entirely like a beginning.

In Evergreen, this exchange moves beyond the works and into the gallery itself.

Artificial grass covers the exhibition floor, creating the appearance of a landscape through something decidedly manufactured. The gallery walls, meanwhile, are left in a concrete-like gray primer, suspended between the appearance of finished architecture and the literal process of being painted. Rising from this deliberately unfinished environment is a wooden structure built using the framing process of a home, four sections converging at a central point and shifting between familiar architectural geometries depending on one's perspective. Together, the space appears caught somewhere between construction and completion, an architecture still becoming. Within this skeletal structure, Paiement's works on paper invite viewers into a quieter version of the same perceptual exchange taking place throughout the exhibition.

The structure is not quite a house. The grass is not quite a field. And the paintings are never entirely landscapes.

They exist instead in a state of possibility.

There is something deeply human about standing before an open landscape and wondering what might someday live there. The impulse can contain aspiration and destruction, shelter and expansion, curiosity and possession. The history of the American West makes these contradictions difficult to ignore. But Paiement does not attempt to resolve them.

Instead, he leaves us looking.

The title Evergreen carries its own contradiction. It suggests something enduring, perpetually alive and resistant to the passage of seasons. Yet Paiement encountered these landscapes precisely through change, traveling between summer and winter, watching familiar terrain become unfamiliar again. Within the gallery, even green itself becomes artificial.

Perhaps permanence, like the distinction between nature and ourselves, is another idea we have projected onto the landscape.

What remains is the possibility of seeing it differently.