caja 5+5

#01 / My Fire Enwrapped within my paper

A foreword for 5+5 contemporay works on paper by Pao Pao, 泡泡

If possible, I would like to continue writing line after line until I fill this entire sheet of paper, then onto the next one… in that case, I would attain a projected rhythm and disposition in order to “complete towards a poem”. Rather than writing a foreword or commentary, this is an attempt to approach or capture the aura and spirit of these works on paper, along with these ten artists to stand on paper and sit around in a circle to dream.

Yes, paper is differentiated by raw or aged, characterized differently. Our shared feminine sensibility allow us to meet in the dream of dreams in the myriads of this world, needless to translate, or even speak, we would be able to share these vivid and rare outcomes, sweetness within bitterness, happiness within sorrow.

Whether paper is the medium, or a friend, or the enemy, it allows art to discover the physical existence of desire, arrival and emergence.

For Chen Zijun, these warm color tone acrylic is melting one’s material desire and the body, makes one associate it with the intimacy of childhood, the warmth and distance between people. On a thin paper, everything was transformed. For Matilde Vela, it was between the most rigid metal and the most irresistible paper, like a poetic androgynous being, ruined, minimal and impulsive; Yang Shun has found those crinkled mood and language between papers (parchment paper, handmade paper, and watercolor paper). Her work expands, delimits, floats, in muted silence, temperamental, like the dispersing smoke, or the fluid water; For Maribel Mas, the lithographic traces left on paper are full, its tension are restrained and subdued, as if the artist purposefully prevents the figure to escape from the crevasses of the paper and the lithographic plate; and both Rosa Solano and Victoria Rabal were more inclined to find a place to rest the soul within the objects. Rosa wishes everything returns to emptiness, and to use texture, structure and color blocks to deflect the humility of the heart, the isolation and modesty of the world view; On the other hand, Victoria Rabal who requires every rubbed objects to leave its most vivid figure on paper, to achieve an elegant and noble beauty like the figures and objects by Diego Velasquez, even though the property and functionality of the object has never been completely seen….

Qiu Hong’s world of ink painting seems tender, concise lines and rich colors, brilliantly highlights the beauty of the rice paper, like the Song dynasty verses, short lyrics, coated in dreamy papers, soaked with meaning; in comparison, Hou Shanhu’s ink language tends to be leisurely and meditative. The chaos and hatched beauty expressed through asexual diction in a wide area between rubbing and ink painting, seems to both mesmerizing and controlling of its tension. As for He Kuirui and Nuria Rossell, one paints meditatively to slate knives on paper, and the other patiently repeats and progresses in her details while being immersed with wild passion; one explores within the darkness of the self, and the other tightens every thread within the openness of Carmen；one breathes deeply in the shadow of the world, the other builds a totem of the minute objects within the faded color papers.

Everything, like what the female poet Wang Xiaoni has written long ago,
“Alive between every breath
on my paper
that always enwraps my fire”

Returning to the paper, is also returning to this fire.

Either it’s dim or blazing, I am only one being part of it.

Therefore, what “she” is, has never been, or is only what other’s can perceive.

泡泡

Pao Pao