ARTIST PAUL WEINER
Paul Weiner was born in Aurora, Colorado in 1993. He received a BFA in Painting from Syracuse University in 2015 and his works have been included in solo and group exhibitions all over the world.
Your Greatest Inspirations or Influences Paul?
When my brother and I were kids, my grandfather, Leonard, would sit us down in the morning with an apple juice and a newspaper. He’d concoct the most tantalizing and fantastical fake news stories and pretend to read them to us out of the newspaper. That’s where I learned how to spin a story. Whether I knew it or not at the time, that’s where my creative life began. My most recent project, which revolves around disinformation, is modeled after that formative experience.
As a painter, I look at Mark Bradford, Keltie Ferris, Jenny Holzer, David Hammons, Deborah Roberts, and Jasper Johns as influences. There is also a scene of artists who came up on Instagram around 2015-2018 that I think my work is in dialogue with: Jenny Brosinski, Richie Culver, Dana James, Taylor A White, Sami Korkiakoski, Jorge Galindo, David Donald Sutherland, Jonathan Todryk, and multiple others.
Tell us about your creative process-
My work oscillates between abstraction and conceptualism, and the lines between the two blur together in the form of symbols. Whether I'm using the American flag as a brush or painting redacted areas extracted from the legal documents surrounding the 2012 Aurora Theater shooting that occurred in my hometown, there is always a symbol behind the abstraction. When I began painting my charcoal abstractions, I thought of them as post-object paintings that would be viewed more on Instagram than in real life. In that way, they became a symbol for my online audience and their tastes in a way that is site-specific to the internet. With the introduction of AI-generated installation shots of paintings that don't exist in physical reality, this process is getting even more abstract and meta. That type of abstraction is emblematic of my general process as an artist, which usually starts with a symbol or idea and becomes more and more abstracted over time.
Exciting career highlights for you so far?
I've been very privileged to show my work in galleries and institutions around the world, but the art residencies are where I've learned the most, growing both as an artist and in my career. Kehinde Wiley bought a few paintings in 2019 and flew me out to Dakar to paint in the studios at his residency, Black Rock Senegal, while the space was still under construction. Dakar was an incredibly beautiful city, and I treasured my short time there. I owe a debt of gratitude to the curator Aaron Levi Garvey who opened the Long Road Projects residency in Jacksonville, Florida, and believed in my work before anyone else did. Markus Kersting brought me on board to his gallery in Cologne and built a market for my work in Europe, allowing me to show some of my most conceptual works in a context that escaped Instagram and established my career. Alongside Dirk and Anja Axt, Markus started a new residency in Weidingen last year that helped me find myself again after the pandemic, and I learned a lot of German there too.
How do you feel about AI and its effect in the art world?
The introduction of AI is as close to an industrial revolution as I've seen in my lifetime, and artists need to grapple with it just as everyone else does. Lately, I've been feeding photos of my paintings into an AI image generator as models and letting it use my intellectual property to create installation shots of fake paintings. I'm posting them on Instagram, and some of my followers are just learning as they read this sentence that the photos of my work that they see on Instagram are AI-generated. These images are part of a much broader conceptual project I'm working on using AI as a tool that has landed fake stories of mine about politics, war, art, housekeeping, aliens, sex, Harry Potter, and more in viral posts with millions of views, memes, and major newspapers around the world. Those stories will be revealed in my next solo exhibition about the construction of alternate realities online and our inability to confirm the veracity of information in the 21st Century. In May, Paulette Perhach of the New York Times talked to me about my AI-generated disinformation art project, and it was exciting to see a snippet about it in the paper of record.
Why are you using AI to make this conceptual project?
I want to make something that captures the zeitgeist of our time, what I would call an internet-augmented time. As the post-internet era of integrating the internet into our lives vanishes into the last decade, we find ourselves in fragmented realities of our own construction. Content migrates through an echo chamber from 4chan to Reddit to TikTok to Twitter (X) to podcast to Instagram with most users having no idea where the content originated. Even when millions of people consume a meme or video, there’s no way to know if the person standing in line next to you at the grocery store has seen what you see. The result is a fragmented physical reality where you can’t assume that your neighbors even have a reference point to understand where you consume information, much less what you consume. You saw a Tweet by @shoe0nhead (556k followers) while you were doomscrolling, not a story on the big local radio station that everyone listens to or the same 2009 SportsCenter highlights that your friends saw last night.
As high-speed internet access spreads to the farthest reaches of society, office workers move their work hours home, and metro area housing prices balloon, the reasons to live near disconnected others with only banal shared experiences like weather and traffic dwindle. Why not move to that beautiful rural and quiet place where housing is cheap if it doesn't impact your work life? At the same time, new online tools augment our physical lives, blurring the line between fantasy and reality. Hinge users edit and yassify their selfies with AI until they are unrecognizable when they get to their first date. Instagram users painfully convince themselves that they’re famous. TikTok users obsess over fantasy filters that morph their identities or replace their facial features with a dog's. Twitter users curate and consume radicalized news bubbles that feed their superegos, and you don’t even want to know what 4chan users are consuming.
Politics are niche. The toxic train derailment in East Palestine was like 9/11 for some Twitter users, but most Americans have already forgotten or never heard about it at all. The government tells us aliens exist, so conspiracy theorists tell us they don’t! Mainstream journalists find sources on Twitter using #journorequest and quote whoever DMs quickest with a punchy reply without regard for whether the source’s information is verifiably true.
My art should reflect society, and that means it should be similarly internet-augmented, fragmented, and isolated like the experiences that we have in our daily lives. The art should lie, use filters, simulate fame and ambition, visually seduce, pull dark laughs out of our bodies, rely on AI even as it distrusts it, wade into the waters of conspiracy, and force its viewers to question what is real about it and what is not.
Do you consider yourself an abstract artist?
Yes. As a painter, I see myself as part of a tradition of abstraction that has somewhat Jewish roots from the post-war abstract expressionism of Mark Rothko, Lee Krasner, Adolph Gottlieb, Philip Guston, Barnett Newman, Clement Greenberg, Harold Rosenberg to the more contemporary Julian Schnabel and Alex Katz.
What does well-being mean to you?
Well-being means having the time to make art. I'm a happy man when I'm painting or thinking.
