Art: Horse Cave Boy in Paris

Paris gallery owners estimate that there are about 100 serious U.S. painters now working in Paris, but few of them have attracted as much attention as 35-year-old Joe Downing, who comes from Horse Cave, Ky. (pop. 1,545). With scraps of specially treated paper and a stapler to fasten them together, Downing produces "paintings" that have brought French critics under his spell.

After an Army stint in Europe during World War II, Downing decided to become an optometrist because the only optometrist he had ever known back home was rich enough to own a Cadillac. But while he was completing his studies in Chicago, he fell in with a group of young writers and painters whose nightlong talk of art and life intoxicated him. He attended classes at the Art Institute, in 1950 scraped together enough money to get to Paris. Except for an occasional trip home, he has lived there ever since.

In Paris he began the climb that is familiar to so many painters. There was the dreary little hotel on the Rue Dauphine "where you cooked under a sign that said 'cooking prohibited.' " In 1952 he had his first Paris one-man show, and on its second day, a kindly bald-headed man dropped in and stayed for 20 minutes. The man was Pablo Picasso; his comment: "Well done." Though Downing still works each afternoon in a U.S. law office as a sort of office boy, his afterhours reputation has mounted steadily.

He has never been an action painter, spontaneous and impetuous: he feels that the New York school too often confuses facility with freedom. Up at 6:30 each morning, Downing paints with razor and palette knife, turning out rough-textured canvases that resemble nothing on earth.

Some are composed of great oblong globs of glowing color; others are webs of matted threads that circle and swoop but never get tangled. When Downing first began his "stapleages." he stapled together bits of wills, marriage licenses and birth certificates—the documents of life itself.

Now he achieves subtler "stone poems" with photosensitive paper treated to give rocklike textures.

The stapleages have kooky titles: Once is not Custom, Miss Brown to You, Panic in the Harem. Within a few days after the current exhibition opened at the Galerie Arnaud, more than half of Downing's compositions were sold.