“Tom Paiement: 20 Years of Exploration” is a mini retrospective featuring the quirky and brilliant systems-oriented art of one of Maine’s most playfully original artists. Paiement is an excellent painter, a superb draftsman and a skilled printmaker. All of this is evident in spades among the 80 works (let’s call them paintings) packed into four major installation walls and a few punctuating individual works. But what Paiement does best is dig deep into the systems through which art works. He is an iconoclast and his revolutionary streak is evident in his comfort with blowing things up.

Literally. Sort of. In a couple of still lifes – flowers in vases – he includes bits of actual boxes of things like dynamite. The wit circuit is made complete when we see the flower pedals are made of actual wooden shards. As the flower, they are the explosion. Boom.

I’ve seen some of these “still lifes” before, but Paiement even goes so far now as to remove the flowers from their vases – a step designed to reveal (and literally deconstruct) the convention that the flower goes in the vase and you have yourself a still life. The bottom of the north wall of the gallery features a pair of these vases to the left of their flowery former top halves (and in this form, it’s easier to understand the artist’s point of separating the two components). It’s a radical gesture, but within the context of Paiement’s hanging his works in clustered rectangles comprising 12 to 25 works, it works – and it’s hilarious.

While clustering so much work is potentially overwhelming in terms of seeing any given painting, these dense groupings effectively show the range and the underlying playfulness of Paiement’s production. Virtually nothing stands outside of his targeting: people, people parts, places, art genres, speech bubbles (which inevitably reveal human speech as bloviated screed in the form of scribbled gobbledygook – the idea is that not all systems that purport to convey meaning are actually meaningful), cityscapes, guitar scales, Scientology personality scales (there is some real bite to Paiement’s critical display here; the scales come across quite compellingly as patently absurd), politicians and references to other artists.

Despite his apparent desire to cast himself as a hopeless cynic, Paiement’s art exudes an underlying sweetness. His prints of a pair of legs, on one hand, throw shade on a vacation selfie meme (“these are my feet chilling by the pool”) but they reveal a deep admiration for the prints of Leonard Baskin – and if you can copy Baskin’s chops, then you are no slouch with the chisel and gouge. Paiement’s assemblage painting, “ART,” is a handsome homage most clearly to Jasper Johns (the leading American purveyor of art about art systems) but also to Maine artists Bernard Langlais (the wood bits layer) and Louise Nevelson (the regular color of the wood bits) as well as whomever the gold medallion at the center was awarded (maybe a family member? It’s a work medallion, like for years of service at a company).

Even Paiement’s street drawings from Venice Beach, California, reveal an admiration for fashion drawing, street art (the guy can make a pen fly) and architectural travel drawings. He admires the quick stuff, and he’s good at it.

Where the cynical edge appears, however, it offers a method to critique political speech as meaningless – and to render speech as meaningless, as opposed to unintelligible, is no mean feat. Paiement’s largest image is a gray canvas is from 2018; “Speaking in Tongues 1” (yup, as in, the Talking Heads album featuring “Burning Down the House!”) features six faces rendered in his high-speed hand. Their faces are turned up to make it clear their priority is their own words rather than any appropriate engagement with others (eye contact, etc.). And with six voices screeching, there is no possibility of dialogue. It is about the failure of communication, more like Ionesco’s absurdist “The Bald Soprano” than any tenable discourse.

Here, however, Paiement might be reaching back to systems logic: “The Bald Soprano,” after all, breaks down setting, then story, then characters, then paragraphs, sentences and words until the characters end the play merely shouting random syllables – the very dissection of language from a complex living organism to its elementary parts. It is disturbingly explosive. Boom.

While I think Ionesco’s “Bald Soprano” might be the greatest deconstruction of language proffered by the arts, its own model was far closer to Paiement’s work: Cubism. The early Cubism of Picasso and Braque ( called “Analytic”) looked to the functional, linguistic edge of language (is that a head, a bottle or a guitar?), but later Cubism (“Synthetic”) tasked itself with exploring any possibility of conveying meaning in painting. And while Paiement often puts specific constructs in his sights, his exploratory openness puts him solidly in the camp of Synthetic Cubism. For example, his “Fret Series” allows for the modeling of musical scales as they have shifted throughout the 20th century (e.g., the standard major versus a blues-infused harmonic minor). Further, he presses his case for different systems using systemless tools (compare the guitar to the piano, which essentially lays out the Western diatonic scale with its black and white keys – guitars don’t do black or white). And that rift between system/systemless opens doors for deeper critique.

In the end, I was left with Paiement’s “Songster” images, which undoubtedly are self-portraits. (We’re all shower or car singers, after all, and we get the idea Paiement plays the guitar, but as a secondary practice to his picture making.) One pokes fun at himself, head laid back and mouth blathering like any of his mindless talking heads. But another is self-labeled, abstract and black, painted over like an unheard song sung to the empty night sky. This is where I find Paiement’s subjectivity: sometimes dark and scathingly self-doubting – and all the more brilliant because of it.

Freelance writer Daniel Kany is an art historian who lives in Cumberland. He can be contacted at:

dankany@gmail.com