AphroChic Magazine: Issue No. 4

Interior Design
For 17 years, Paul Suepat has made his
home in the historic Stuyvesant Heights area
of Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn, New York.
The Jamaican-born artist has spent much of
that time in an effort to map the interior of his
mind onto the interior of his home. As a result,
his expansive and beautifully designed brownstone
is as much an art gallery as a home, showcasing
Paul’s surrealist aesthetic while demonstrating
the clear overlap that he feels exists
between art and design.
“I don’t want to be bored,” he muses,
looking effortlessly Brooklyn in an outfit that
pairs a vest and button-down shirt with well
worn jeans, a broken-in “Camp Vibes” ball cap
and meticulously maintained white sneakers.
As we move through the house, his train of
thought doesn’t so much move from topic to
topic as from sentence to sentence as he looks
for the combination of words that will best
convey the meaning he wants to offer. “I’m very
obsessed with art and design,” he adds quickly.
“Growing up as a child I was really obsessed
with art and design, so I created this whole kind
of gallery that you can live in.” Looking around
the amazing interior with its colors, oddities,
and what seems like a million tiny details, it’s
hard to imagine where boredom could hide.
As an artist, Paul Suepat is a man driven
by contrasts. Focused constantly on the
nebulous space between ambiguity and definition,
his art moves between sculpture and
painting, whimsical figures and strong abstract
shapes, specific emotions and imaginative
contexts. Or perhaps the point is not so much
the contrasts themselves, but creating an
instance of connection between them, bridging
the gap so that for the moment in time that the
piece represents, “this” and “that” become indistinguishable.
It’s a drive that fuels his design
aesthetic as well as his artistic approach.
“My design style and my art style are totally
connected,” he reflects. “It’s one of those things
where you can’t stop and say, ‘I’m doing art,’ or
‘I’m doing design.’ I just do.”
If someone were inclined to create their
own private wonderland, they could hardly
do better for a canvas than a brownstone in
Bed-Stuy. The two-story home has spacious
rooms, impossibly high ceilings, and impeccable
architectural details, including crown
moldings on just about every wall and every
ceiling. To step in through the front door is to
be greeted by the home’s classic entryway,
complete with luxuriously tiled floors. The
effect is stunning, but the real attractions start
in the living room, which is just to the left.
There are two things a guest is likely to
notice about Paul Suepat’s living room shortly
after they enter. The second is that it, like many
of the other rooms in the house, is decorated
to take full advantage of the terrific amount of
natural light that the home receives. The first is
that they entered the room between two beautifully
crafted pillars — painted a bright, electrifying
shade of blue.
“I didn’t want to take it too seriously,”
Paul says about his playfully-colored throughway.
“Sometimes columns are so pretentious.
So I said let’s play with it and put it in
blue and just have fun.” Past the pillars, the
living room is the first space in the home to
give a full taste of Paul’s theory of contrasts,
pairing mid-century modern classics with
a surfboard-shaped coffee table and a chair
painted in a screen-printed, rainbow camouflage.
Paul explains his combinations, saying,
“I think design is just design. Whether it’s old,
it’s mid-century, it’s art-nouveau, it’s art-deco,
it’s Memphis, it’s whatever it is. It’s all one.
It’s good design. It’s just how you put them
together and make them work. I have too many
layers sometimes, and it’s about how I put
them together.” But what really helps it all hang
together is the fact that, visually, the furniture
is really just an accessory to the art.
Paul’s art is very patient. It’s surreal in
a way that seems to make sense the first few
times you walk past it, as it waits for you to
take a closer look. For example, one could walk
past the coffee table half a dozen times before
realizing that there’s a six-pack of armed men
sitting on it in a convenient carrying case
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