Paul Rousso

Paul Rousso is an American artist born in North Carolina in 1958 and trained at the Ohio's Cleveland Institute of Art and the California College of the Arts in 1981. His work is based on creating volumes from a flat surface, what he calls "Flat Depth," using complex artistic techniques including painting, printing, digital manipulation, digital printing, and manual heat modeling to transform two-dimensional objects into three-dimensional ones. Rousso takes pop culture and its inherently contradictory sensibilities, such as money, candy wrappers, or magazine pages, and transforms them into large-format works of art. He seeks satire by inflating their size to unusual dimensions, creating a crumpled, three-dimensional appearance for these objects. Rousso's work has been exhibited in numerous galleries, fairs, and art centers in the United States and Europe, and he has received commissions from institutions and public authorities for large-scale pieces in public spaces. Before dedicating himself fully to his artistic career, Rousso worked in advertising and stage design, and was a set painter for Warner Brothers films. He later worked as an art director for companies in the fashion and luxury worlds, such as Revlon, Clairol, Condé Nast, and Bloomingdale's. Rousso's work is an extension of the advertising and media printing press, coinciding with many of the tenets of 1960s American Pop Art, which turned objects from consumer society into icons of modern life. With his "Flat Depth" technique, Rousso seeks to subvert and transform everyday objects into something new and surprising. Rousso's work is featured in numerous private collections in North America, Europe, and the Middle East, as well as in numerous public projects throughout the United States.