Desiree Obtain
Cherish
Jonathan Paul
alias Desire Obtain Cherish
b. 1975, California
Jonathan Paul (DOC) has become known as a conceptual artist working across a wide variety of different media and a combination of styles. His controversial artwork explores contemporary desires and obsessions with sex, gender, drugs, commerce, media, and fame. Transporting controversial, satirical messages, Paul's vibrantly colorful, entertaining and impeccably produced art exposes society’s inability to control itself and examines the commercial promise of fulfillment and happiness that ends in dependency.
Meant to have an impact on its audience, Paul employs sarcasm to tackle and provoke society’s value system. Aiming to avoid the conventional, stereotypical standards of “good taste” in art, his ideas are more in line with contemporary commerce and marketing methods than traditional artisan methods.
The esteemed New Yorker art critic Benjamin Genocchio characterized Paul’s work as “not malicious, even if his works cut to the bone. He is more like our social conscience, delivering up uncomfortable and unpleasant truths wrapped in the most beautiful and seductive of packages.”
Born in 1975 in Salinas, California, Paul graduated from the nationally acclaimed Parson’s School of Design with a Bachelor’s in Fine Arts. Since his first solo show, he has been featured in numerous galleries and art fairs worldwide, and his work has propelled with unusual fervor amid collectors and the public respectively.