“…The theme of Priault’s work strictly is neither that which apparently is represented, nor the manner of its representation, but arises from the painter’s use of each of these categories as a vehicle to create an autonomous time.
One irony is that whatever Priault chooses apparently to represent either resists assignment of a temporal situation by its nature, or contrives to defy temporal situation despite the subject’s intrinsically “historic” content.
Upon viewing a Priault jungle, for example, it is obvious that the painter avoids any time marker that might situate the scene in an identifiable past, present, or future. But this fact is no less true of his cities and “ruins” which pose a further, proleptic temporal plane, the prospect of looking to the past from a vantage in the future…
By investing his images with a temporal dynamic, Priault addresses the problem of realism in a more fundamental way....”