Paul Manes has investigated compositional structures approaching the "all-over" for a number of years, achieving a clarity that effects a wonderfully satisfying combination of dynamism and classicism. His work sets recognizable images from the world around us within a conceptualized framework. While continuing to explore what is seen as his signatory image - a bowl, or half-spherical shape - his palette follows his tendency to work within a restricted range of hues, accentuated by the natural colorations of burlap interacting with passages of the rich off-white of the pigment kaolin and dark red-brown-black earth tonalities.

His landscapes are quite different. These expressionistic paintings are more inclined towards an interpretation of the landscape rather than a reflection. His large canvases depict a more intense and personal view of this genre. Subject matter is important to Manes and is derived from elemental forms in the world and from the painting techniques that the artist uses in order to render them. He wants painting to reach out of itself, to take hold of something tangible. He is mindful of painting as metaphor, set against the background of cultural and historical circumstances; it is important to him that his paintings have meaning, and in exercising his craft he uses a process of repetition through which the vision and experience of reality stretch and release in the mind. The bowl motif epitomizes this attitude. "Everybody, no matter how poor, across all cultures, has a bowl in his hands,” Manes said. “It can contain food, and hope, and often it is empty."

Admired for his mastery of different media, Manes engages the wide range of issues concerning the place of painting in contemporary art. His drawings are rooted in the observational nuance of the classical tradition and stake out his relationship with representational reality. The charcoal and oil paintings explore the painterly and all-over technique of modern art to shift representation towards abstraction. Collage is used to transfer and juxtapose outlines. Scale and the manipulation of planes establish a complex relationship with the viewer.

A Texan by birth and schooled in Texas as well as Hunter College in New York, his work is included in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Detroit Institute of Arts, The Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University, and a number of other public institutions, in addition to numerous private collections in the U.S. and Europe.

Kouros Gallery has published several full color catalogues for Manes.