Paul Nobel is a English painter, draughtsman and installation artist whose small narrative paintings and drawings suggest infantile dream-like worlds. He made whole installations based on a single narrative. The game was accompanied by comic-strip drawings that depicted the unemployed characters leading an aimless existence. Despite the bleakness of his themes, Noble's work is rich in visual delight. Parodying the intense fantastical doodling of teenagers, his paintings, drawings and installations, in which he has invented whole new worlds, marked out a particular territory somewhere between despair and hilarity.
Noble further developed the theme of social hopelessness through the creation of a unique metaphorical urbanscape. Nobson(1998; exh. London, Chisenhale Gal., 1998) is presented as a vision of a utopian city rendered in very large and highly detailed graphitedrawings. Upon closer inspection, the dystopian nature of this imaginary city, its institutions such as the Nobspital, and its dysfunctional occupants becomes apparent. Continuing the Nobson theme, Nobson Newtown (1998; exh. New York, Gorney, Bravin & Lee, 2000) depicts a cityscape in which the rows of buildings spell out the town's name in an orthogonally projected typeface. Noble described the work as ‘Town planning as self-portraiture which helps explain the apparent lack of inhabitants, since the only inhabitant is the artist himself.
Paul Nobel's repertoire comprises of a huge series of pencil drawings of his fictional world, Nobson Newtown, which he has been working on for the past 20 years. Drawn in sharp lines with the hardest pencils, many of the works are epic, pulling in and out of focus on different parts of the town, which often stretch across several sheets of paper. They can span up to seven metres, every centimetre covered in finely detailed fantasy, a landscape filled with such architectural wonders as the Nobspital, Lido Nob and Nobson Central.
People are largely absent – instead, the town is inhabited by what I can only describe as turds. They have been deified in sculptures and, in past drawings, have adopted human traits, getting up to all manner of lurid activities on Nobson’s shopping mall, for instance.
He used drawing as a medium which was risky but had an universal appeal.It was also pragmatic: “I just thought that drawings are quick and I made drawings because you didn’t need any money, you could be poor,” he says.
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