Exhibitions

2023

Janes Deering Gallery, Gloucester, MA

Group Show

2021

Jane Deering Gallery, Gloucester , MA

Solo show

2013

Danforth Museum, Framingham, MA
Community of Artists 

Studio Without Walls | Brookline, MA
To Joyce  

2012

South Shore Art Center, Cohasset, MA
3rd Dimension
Juried by Camilo Alvarez, Samson Projects 

Cambridge Art Association, Cambridge, MA
Blue, It Is more than a Color”
Juried by [?] John Thompson, Director, Mass MoCA

Sculpture in the Park, Franklin Square, Boston
Site Responsive Sculpture

Galatea Fine Art, Boston
New England Collective 111 — 3rd annual juried exhibition

Danforth Museum of Art, Framingham, MA
Off the Wall/Community Artists

Cambridge Art Association, Cambridge, MA
11th Annual National Prize Show

[Venue?], Brookline, MA
REAL ART? an exhibition of site responsive sculpture

2011

Cambridge Art Association, Cambridge, MA
RED, group show
Juried by Howard Yezerski

Juried pop-up, Boston
Candy Colors but not just for Fun

October Ames Mansion, North Easton, MA
9th Annual Blanche Ames National Juried Art Exhibition 

Boston Convention Center Installation
2003 Say It Isn’t So 

DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Park
Corporate Loan Program, Lexington, MA
Dreaming in Color and Evolving

46 Waltham Street, Boston, MA [?]
Installation: Carnivale

Studio Visit Magazine published by Open Studios
Juried by Steven Zevitas

2009

North East Prize Show Curated by William Stover
Contemporary Art Curator MFA Boston 

Khaki Gallery, Boston
Solo Show

French Library and Cultural Center of Boston
Solo exhibition

2007 

46 Waltham Street, Boston, MA [?]
Installation: Say It Isn’t So

38 Cameron Gallery, Cambridge, MA
Group Show

Moakley Center, Boston Medical Center, Boston
Installation of paintings: Beyond Series

2006

Kingston Gallery, Boston
New Art 06, National juried show

38 Cameron Gallery, Cambridge, MA
Group Show (reviewed in Artscope) [include link to issue or copy of review]

46 Waltham Street, Boston
Installation: No Entry

2005

St John's University, Jamaica, NY
10th Annual National Invitational Art Exhibit, National juried group show

Cambridge Art Association, Cambridge, MA
National Prize Show, National juried group show

Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Gallery, Holy Cross College, MA
Two Person exhibition

Invitation to Florence Biennale, Florence, Italy 

2004

Courtyard Gallery, South End, Boston
Group Show

2003

French Library and Cultural Center of Boston
Solo exhibition 

Centre d’Exchange Cultural d’Auvillar, France
Exposition (two person show) 

The Copley Society, Boston, MA
Spring Associate member juried show 

2002

Mass College of Art Student Life Gallery, Boston
Emerging: Creative Process (four person group show)

Auvillar Frence, Artist in Residence

Mass College of Art Student Life Gallery, Boston
Juried Group Show 

The Mass Art Auction
Juried Show 

Efka Project for Emerging Artists, Jamaica Plain, Boston
One Person Show

Mass College of Art, Boston
Juried exhibition 

2001

The Copley Society, Boston
Small Paintings Show 

Mass College of Art Student Life Gallery
Unconventional (four person group show) 

Granite Shore Gallery, Rockport, MA
Group Exhibit

The Copley Society, Boston
Spring Associate member Juried Show 

EFKA Project Gallery, Jamaica Plain, Boston
Group Exhibit

1999

Rockport Art Association Contributing Members Exhibit
Exhibited drawing and painting (Honorable Mention) 

1994

Boston Center for the Arts
Show organizer for World Aids Day exhibition Expressions of Healing

Art New England: Julienne Thibodeaux,

July 31, 2021

James Paradis proves that abstract painting is alive and well—and not always two dimensional. Paradis’s solo show at the Jane Deering Gallery in Gloucester captures an art career that began relatively late in life—Paradis completed his BFA at Mass College of Art in his early 70s—yet his work reflects a fully realized aesthetic that spans the nearly two decades since. Paradis’s works strike both gestural and meditative notes (as the exhibition title suggests) while affirming something deeply primal about the way humans communicate through image.

As is often the case with art, Paradis’s sculptured paintings were initially the result of an accident: a frustrated moment in the studio that resulted in a balled-up sheet of paper unfurled and push-pinned to the wall, its newly revealed contours revealing other possibilities. Paradis pursued this “shaped canvas” approach to fruitful ends while continuing to explore the flat canvas.

Among the more sensual of the shaped works is Cloud 9 (2016, oil on sculptured canvas), a curvaceous and yes, as the name suggests, billowing, even undulating, sculptured painting. The piece simultaneously conjures marshmallows, rumpled bed sheets, and, of course, clouds. Its white hues are both subtle and complex with the emergent contours and shadows adding even more depth. A nearly indiscernible light blue seems to whisper from beneath to suggest clouds floating in the sky, viewed from an airplane window looking down. Paradis’s flat canvases are also, in many cases, nearly monochromatic, yet stop short of color field; and many of the paintings are textured, moving into space as if reaching out to the sculptured works. In both cases, abstraction dances with image: figures, walls, faces; water, sky, earth.

There’s gesture, there’s color, and there’s three-dimensionality, in all cases paying homage—whether to a single color (say yellow, blue, or green) or aesthetic idea, and always conveying a delightful ephemerality: A face emerging from an amber-hued color field, a ghost-like apparition in the shadows of a wall, an ocean with primordial beginnings foreshadowed in tiny points of light. As Paradis puts it, “for out of nothing rebirth and renewal happens.”

ARTSCOPE
May 2006

“… James Paradis' lone canvas rides high on the wall of a room mostly devoted to smaller works. They seem to notate slight shifts of thought to his fully formed declaration of an artist's "Manifest Destiny." Paradis' bold stripes and broad planes of color cling to a canvas convulsing in seismic folds, at once virile and vulnerable

Art New England: James Foritano

25/50: REUNION X 2
RECENT WORK BY JAMES STROUD '80 AND JAMES PARADIS '55

October/November 2005

Waiting in the wings of this review, impatiently, is James Paradis, a full fifty years out of Holy Cross, busied, until 1995, with the Boston real estate market and an avid interest in art and drawing. Then, on the cusp of retirement, he felt drawn to a more academic and intensive engagement with art; so, at the age of 71, he joined the ranks of students at the Massachusetts College of Art and graduated recently with the Bachelor of Fine Arts.

Three intensely different canvases titled Moody Green demonstrate his early preference for landscape painting and his restless exploration of new territory. Moody Green # 7 is a 2-foot-square oil that descends from spring green to the dark moods of decay by way of an impassioned burst of stem shapes etched into a thick impasto. At the other end of the Moody Green spectrum is one of Paradis's signature "shaped" canvases.

Painted in sensuous mixtures of rich oils bespeaking humid vegetative processes, then wrapped in cool geometries of stripes, rhomboids, and triangles, these frameless canvases bulge out from their sites in alarming and mesmerizing convolutions, which lie in wait rather than reside around the corners of the Cantor Gallery. Are they topographies of the soul or of soulful whims? Either way, they form unique hybrids of space and line and color, with dimensions as mysteriously contiguous as the sides of their many-sided moods. Seventeen abstract oils on paper are each of modest size but of entirely immodest reach in their tonal subtleties, tensions, and calligraphic vigor. These round out the world of Paradis, a world of engaging leaps and poignant hesitations.