Paul Caranicas

A graduate of Georgetown University, the Corcoran School of Art, the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, and the Art Students League, Caranicas brings formidable technical skill to haunting architectural subject matter. Though not a Photorealist, Caranicas works from photographs in painting the abandoned shells of World War II defensive bunkers along the French and U.S. coastlines and in the Channel Islands. In the rigorous linearity of the blocklike concrete shapes, Caranicas sees beautiful architectural structures that for him have political and intellectual, as well as aesthetic, implications. Caranicas sets the defense bunkers into landscapes purified to the point of surrealism, and in his most recent work, pieces together sheets of paper at geometrically irregular angles to further distort the appearance of reality.

Virginia M. Mecklenburg Modern American Realism: The Sara Roby Foundation Collection (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press for the National Museum of American Art, 1987)