The Brooklyn Rail

Do we think flags are innocent? In Paramin Jab Molassie (2024) Paul Anthony Smith affixes three black-white-and-red Trinidad and Tobago flags to a print which depicts elements of Caribbean Carnival. The flags hang over a mosaic of snapshots, some of which are dark: all we see are the silhouettes of figures in a night parade. Other vignettes in the mosaic show dancers and revelers in the blue body paint and horn disguises of Jab Jab. These costumes have a demonic side, in contrast to the typical feather and sequin costumes we think we know of Carnival. Smith’s new multimedia works, of which there are four in the current exhibition, seem to use the flag as a masking device. Are these flags covering up, or protecting these hidden rituals? Considering this use of flags, one thinks of Childe Hassam’s naïve, yet beautiful, patriotism, or Jasper Johns’s more introspective probing of a basic and very charged symbol. Paul Anthony Smith slips in somewhere halfway.

The flag is a sign of individuality and empowerment, especially in a Caribbean context, where a series of island nations have borne the brunt of tourism from a Euro-American world little interested in distinguishing among them. The flags are a way of saying who they are. But the general sensibility of Paramin Jab Molassie leans towards other, darker meanings. Smith’s signature use of picotage—plucking at the surface of the print to produce patterns of small raised paper tears—produces a pattern of stocky squared Xs, almost like a political or heraldic insignia (think Greek or Maltese Cross). Flags are clannish, warlike symbols, and at heart they are colorful because they are violent: subtlety is counterproductive in war. Here, the flags, picotage patterns, and shadowy figures Smith pictures are the supposedly happy tourist destination islands showing their teeth.

Elation, ecstasy, and danger: in his pictage and flag paintings Smith is addressing the idea of the crowd, the actions of the masses and the subsidence of the individual. In Untitled (2024) there are grins and laughter, but also side-eye and upraised arms. With Caricom 2 (2022–23) Smith alternates his crowd images between black-and-white and color photography, creating a filmic quality that plays with temporality, as if some scenes were happing in the past while others are in the present. These moments are always flickering behind the picotage barrier, decorative patterns of cinder block walls which let in light and air, a common architectural element on the islands. But they also prevent movement from one space to another. The most effective evocation of this separation is also the simplest. In Untitled (2024), a single frame shows brightly dressed revelers with LEDs in their hands whirling in blurry ellipses and fuzzy strokes, while a decorative barrier of slender lines and curlicues, a metal gate, neatly overlays the rectangle of the photographic print. The partition is almost invisible, and in its extended curlicues, also elegant. Here the alienated anthropology of colonialism, admiring but patronizing, keeping the other at arm’s distance, is encapsulated.

In addition to Smith’s images of crowds, photo-based paintings of women and landscapes are also included here. Mesh Marina (2024) is a figure looking down, perhaps intent on dancing, or listening. Her dress is made of yellow tassels, which seem to throb, and her hoop earring is similarly distorted as it swings through the air. Smith is investigating the blur of movement, using painting to heighten the lack of detail, a seeming contradiction. In Blabba Mout 2 (2024) three women intrude upon an expanse of patterned cinder block wall. The features of the figure in the foreground are delightfully grotesque as she’s been caught turning her head: a mouth with heavy lipstick now spans the entire lower portion of her face and one eye is rendered simply a black hole. Similarly, her costume, whether sequins or more tassels, is represented as a cascade of undulating rivulets of color. The palm trees in Final Hour (grey area) (2017–24), To be titled (grey area) (2017–24), and To be titled (grey area) (2017–24) twitch and throb under Smith’s hybridization of photo and painting, adding a foreboding quality to paradise.

As in his last exhibition, Smith bookends this show with two ironic Caribbean reveries: Gods Eye (Jamaica) (2023) at the start and Eye Fi Di Tropics (St. Thomas) (2021–23) at the conclusion. These are blinding sunsets that cast islands and palms in shadow, overlaid by doily-like picotage fences and gates. These images remind the viewer that although we will never have the artist’s honest familiarity with these places, through his work we can learn a healthy respect for them that moves beyond misguided notions of paradise.