“Ideas win today in our society. I ingest, then digest. Art is really just a mirror of ourselves.” - Jonathan Paul
Since his emergence as street artist in the early 2000s, Jonathan Paul, also known as Desire Obtain Cherish has become known as pop sculptor working across a wide variety of different media and a combination of styles including street, pop, conceptual and appropriation art. His controversial art work 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 debut in a street-art gallery in Los Angeles (2011), he has risen to prestigious solo shows worldwide., His work has propelled with unusual fervor amid collectors and the public respectively.
Jonathan Paul lives and works in Los Angeles.