Caldwell Snyder is excited to announce South African artist Paul Balmer’s premiere solo exhibition in our Montecito Gallery. The exhibition will feature a collection of his most recent Landscape & Still Life paintings.

A balance of serenity and complexity characterizes Paul Balmer’s recent still lifes and landscapes, with luminous scenes that on further inspection involve intricate and sophisticated relationships of pattern, color, and form. Balmer approaches his compositions through a process that continuously breaks down and builds up the image, using tools and multiple layers of paint. Up close, their highly textured surfaces are full of innumerable marks that he achieves through a process of scraping, sanding, and scratching. Yet from a distance, the surfaces give way to an overall impression of softness and simplicity.

Blending reality with his unique interpretation of situations in nature, Balmer infuses everyday objects and landscapes with new dimensions through subtle distortions and changes in perspective. He works intuitively, constructing scenes by memory:

I prefer doing many drawings from my imagination. This way I can focus on the shapes, light, shadow, and composition while not feeling tied to any rules of how things should be.

Paul Balmer was born and raised in South Africa and is currently based in Connecticut. Caldwell Snyder Gallery has proudly represented Balmer since 2001. His work is included in many private and public collections including Delta Airlines, Marriott Hotels Boston, The Queen Mary 2, The Dana Farber Cancer Institute, Yale New Haven Hospital, Bridgeport Hospital and Suffolk University. His work has been shown in galleries in the U.S., UK, Holland, South Africa, South Korea, and Australia.