• 
• Born, USA, New York city, Educated: High School of Art & Design, Cooper Union School of Art & Architecture. BFA
  Selected Recent Exhibits :
  Ben Friedman gallery, Los Angeles, CA.
• Other exhibitions :
  Fulton Strret Exhibtion, N.Y.C.
  Bowery Artists exhibit, N.Y.C.
  112 Green Street Gallery, N.Y.C.
  10 Downtwon art exhibit, N.Y.C.
• Museum collections:
  Kinsey Institute permanant collection,
  Museum of Erotica, Barcelona, Spain, permanant collection
  The Erotic Musuem, Los Angeles, CA. permanant collection
  The sex musuem, New York, NY permanant collection
  The museuo Del Erotica, Barcelona Spain
  Miami Contemprary art musuem
• Publications:
  Hoard magazine feature article. Sept. 2001 issue San Francisco, USA
• 
• Las Vegas Arts Info Center

• RECENT ARTIST REVIEW :

• Paul-Felix Montez, "Under garments to high art"

• Written by:

• Kayley Vernallis Ph.D.
  Professor Aesthetics & Philosophy
  California State University, Los Angeles

Cigarette butts, Brillo Boxes and Campbell soap cans are familiar Pop art icons. Although Hanes briefs and XXX sized girdles where proper subjects for the 60's Pop Art and 70's Feminist Art alike, in the recent work of Paul-Felix Montez such undergarments become far more beautiful, rich and compelling. While Warhol's repetition of soup can imagery serve to narrow our imaginative powers and to affix in our minds one dominant prototype, Montez's iteration of lingerie recalls jazz improvisation. In depicting the folding and bunching of fabric, and the overlapping of garments, the work succeeds in fusing still life imagery with the abstract compositional strength of Robert Motherwell and the lyrical drawing of Cy Twombly. In recalling the expressionist's attention to line, surface, and gesture, Montez is part of a new vanguard of Los Angeles artists who embrace aesthetic pleasure.

Mysterious and stunningly beautiful, the prints and paintings resist our attempt to grasp their media or process, alternatively posing as a kind of photographic negative or traditional etching. In fact Montez directly inks undergarments from cotton jockstraps and girdles, to nylon fishnet penile sheaf's and silk G-strings. He then using highly refined inking and paint techniques, he places them directly between two sheets of paper, meticulously applying pressure to produce the final work. Many of the images contain "ghosts" (second or third printings of the garments' remaining ink residue) and in these images one especially is reminded in turn of Calligraphy, stop-action photos of moving jellyfish, and the early 1840's photographic salt prints of William Henry Fox Talbot.

Montez has been making mono-prints for a number of years, but recently he has begun producing works on larger scale, using a mixed media approach. He digitally enlarges his hand-inked monotypes, printing the image on canvas in sizes ranging from 4'x6' to 7'x7'. Then he hand paints in areas of dark and light, adding thread and string to remind us the threaded undergarments which first formed the material basis of art work. These larger works fundamentally alter our relationship to the subject matter of the earlier prints. We leave behind the intimacies of still life---of the brassieres stored in a cedar lined drawer or the panties hanging at night from a backyard clothes line. Rather now we as viewers are challenged to accept the idea that the erotic, personal, and private articles that clothe our bodies have, through the artist's hand, a right to command the entire room, our entire attention and our complete presence of being.