CBCA is proud to present Technobabble Blue, a solo exhibition featuring a new collection of oil paintings by Paul Michael Graves. Technobabble Blue explores the concept of contrast through Graves’s choice of color and creative process, considering dichotomies such light and dark, frenzy and calm, and technology and humanity.

Graves begins his exploration of contrast through his selective color pallet, composing the entire collection in two shades of blue: rich indigo and light blue. While one half of the collection features delicate, light blue graphic patterns creeping across flat fields of intense indigo blue, the other half feature the inverse: abstracted, fine-lined geometric designs rendered in dark blue floating amid cloud-like light blue backgrounds. The patterns featured in each composition are Graves’s signature technobabble line-work. Derived from his backgrounds in mathematics, aviation, and architecture, Graves plays with pattern, repetition, and basic geometry to represent an abstract diagrammatic language. His technobabble script references a variety of artistic and technical influences such as graffiti, 1980’s Pop Art, maps, formulas, and circuity, giving the overall impression of an intuitive blend between the organic and the mechanical. His technobabble script is in and of itself a commentary on the increasing influence of technology over people’s lives and thus furthers his examination of contrasts by expressing both a tension and harmony between humanity and technology. By rendering this scientifically inspired script by hand, Graves stresses the humanness, and thus the beauty, behind technology. When viewed side-by-side, each composition enhances the visual contrast of the others, making the technobabble ‘text’ appear a little sharper and the backgrounds appear a little softer or more saturated, respectively, in comparison. Moreover, the consistency of color and composition across the collection allows the viewer to focus on the subtle variations in each painting’s technobabble script, seemingly putting each piece in conversation with one another as they react and respond to the works on either side, moving and shifting withing the boarders of the canvas.

By creating each oil painting using rapid alla prima brushwork, Graves also engages with the juxtaposition between instantaneousness and patience. Alla prima brushwork is a process of applying wet paint over wet paint at high-speed allowing the fresh paint to blend with the background. While in the past Graves has created paintings through the patient application of layers over time, this new production method allowed him to produce each piece in a single session. Inspired by the Japanese idiom “Ichi-go ichi-e” roughly meaning “this time only” Graves describes that, “each moment and each convergence of time, space, light, mood, thought, and circumstance is singular and unrepeatable. As such, every encounter should be met with one’s full, attuned senses. I don’t go over a brushstroke a second time. I don’t wait and finish it tomorrow. Each figure in Technobabble Blue represents where I was that day.” Interestingly, in contrast with the rapid process Graves employs to produce each work, the confidence and mastery of technique required of this method is what comes through in the final composition. The stable blue backgrounds and delicately creeping technobabble texts lend a sense of calm to each painting. Graves describes entering a quieting flow state while producing each work in which instinct guided his movements from moment to moment, snuffing out his propensity toward perfectionism. This confidence and intuitiveness resonate in the final compositions. When displayed together, the collection gives the impression of a visual representation of breathing. Each steady indigo exhale the grounding contrast to the refreshing inhale.