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Papo Colo in the Void: Dark Spaces & Other Places
by Carlo McCormick
When there is no where left to go, and yet you must still go on. When
novelty has dissolved in the feedback of some perpetual time loop, the
time line has hit recycle mode and everything is neo- and post-, what is
apres-post? What comes next, and how do we find our way out of these cynical
dead ends of deconstructed revisionisms? If we have come to the end and
there is more to come, we are lost in such a way that it is impossible,
intellectually impassable, to retrace our steps. And somehow we go back-
not to where we have been or to the journey itself, but to the fulcrum
of inertia, that imprecise moment when the motion pauses, a rest, and then
by a singular and similar effort, starts up anew.
We no longer know where we are as a culture because we have mapped
the topography in such detail that we have forgotten what we were looking
for in the first place. And I can think of few other artists today than
Papo Colo who can help remind me what it was all about at the beginning,
who can lead us out of the forest of representation into the deeper primal
miasma of essence. Colo has returned art to its original organic experience;
the primary gestures of expression, the ephemeral mystery and the elemental
faith by which every mark constitutes a greater social practice of religio-magical
wish fulfillment.
Colo, the gangster gypsy, has a con’s eye for art’s industry of pop
and the entertainer’s new clothes as mere conceptual counterfeit. He knows
his way around, and has some practice in getting out of tough spots. And
as the rest of us stand amidst the ruins of rationalism, this guy just
kicks back and lets loose a dream, a riff on the invisible, the lost song
of the shaman, the ancient magic that only a true huckster can manage.
He’s not looking for the answers cause he knows the only escape is into
the ephemeral, intangible and unknowable. In an age of relativism, Colo
seeks none of that insight, hindsight or foresight that has become such
pervasive critical currency. You don’t ask a prankster for the truth, you
just try to follow the riddle and hope you get the punch line. A slip of
the mind in the sleight of a hand, Colo pursues conjectures as a matter
of devious and delirious projections. It’s a process far more than a product,
a visual language meant to travel distances that stretch beyond all the
networks of our ever-expanding interconnectivity.
Papo Colo communicates in the mediums of yore, the smoke signals, tribal
drummings and psychic faxes by which the remote and Other correspond in
ways beyond the science of signs. His creativity is truly making something
out of nothing, a fact born out not in the objects themselves but in their
nature as evidence rather than artifact. His pictures are direct descendants
of the very first images that this stupid ape of humanity ever made. They
follow the blind superstition of those pre-historic cave painters scrawling
impressions of animals to bring good fortune to their hunting. They’re
in synch with the beat of our most ancient drummers, and gaze to the heavens
with the same innocent wonder of any toddler- that very first act of imagination
in gazing at those clouds floating by to conjure images from their ever-shifting
forms. Like those sounds you cannot see or the atmospheric effects you
cannot touch, Colo has found his way to continue the legacy of artistic
expression after history, along a lost, winding, bumpy and overgrown path,
a trip through the ether of transpersonal enlightenment. If we must believe
that ‘truth is beauty and beauty is truth,’ Colo’s alternative, perhaps
an ugly lie, is a pursuit of something far more ambivalent, dark and elusive
we call the sublime.
At the heart of this then, if we could put a single face to the collective
demonology lurking in the swirling dissolve of Colo’s primal maelstrom,
is an almost formalist debate between beauty and the sublime. And though
they have often, in the casualization of language and the relativism of
Kant’s philosophical scrutiny, been interchanged as one and the same, there
is most certainly a deep emotional chasm between the orderly and symmetrical
perfect ideal of beauty and the chaotic and threatening awesome intensity
of the sublime. As the incendiary horror and black clouds of September
11th summoned for us, the sublime constitutes a spectacle far greater than
our imagination or mind can comprehend. This indeed is very different from
the readable grace of beauty. And if beauty is an absolute, Colo is after
an entirely different authority based upon ambiguity, abstraction, hallucination,
dream, trance and inner dread. His is the dark clouds on the horizon, the
disembodied pulse deep in the jungle, far from the compressive constructions
and consignments of civilization. Beauty is what we know, our perception
of how the divine manifests itself as a creation in its own image upon
our earthly realm. The sublime, inherited from the Romantics who grappled
with its vast and violent form as the legacy of the First Century Greek
philosopher Longinus, is much more about what we do not and cannot know,
neither a creation or an image but a destruction, a glimpse registered
in the void of a psychic abyss that, to Longinus, transports us up to “the
majestic mind of God.”
In short, what we see as beauty is material and substantial, what we
feel as the sublime in Colo’s paintings is utterly immaterial and transubstantial.
If the former is defined in the object, then the latter is implicit in
the act. Colo makes manifest what can otherwise only exist in the vagaries
of the mind, giving an illusion of the concrete and visible attributes
to that which is inherently experiential. What these pictures deliver are
not so much trophies but traces of the hunt. Nothing is on display because
nothing has truly been captured. Visiting Colo’s impossible bestiary is
not a trip to the zoo. There are no cages to contain the mythic. Rather,
the experience of Colo’s art is akin to listening to the rambling, fevered
recollections of some deranged explorer who has wandered too far afield
and can neither grasp nor explain what it is he truly encountered. They
have all the seductive allure of those grainy low resolution, blurry and
barely discernible pictures of the Loch Ness Monster, Big Foot or UFOs,
and a similarly low quotient of believability. Here is a purely process-based
art, directly descendent of performance art, offering artifacts of temporal
gestures done in space as ‘drumming paintings’ or the pseudo-veracity of
photography (doctored here by Colo’s fanciful hand with no less a sense
of exaggeration than Yves Klein’s dubious documentation of his leap into
the void) as evidence of events outside the picture itself. They say, this
is what I was doing and this is what I saw, you weren’t there, but these
other fantastical creatures were, and here are the pictures to prove it.
The suspension of belief is such that we do not need to question the authenticity
of the illustrations, only to enjoy the dexterity of the story-teller.
The credibility of Colo’s art lies not in what it actually imagines
but in the organic truth and natural logic of it as a physical theater.
A laying on of hands, by touching the painting Colo is tangibly being there,
immersing the act of creation within the visual dynamic of light and dark,
wrestling a three dimensional chiaroscuro where monsters naturally emerge.
A technique of drawing through painting, brought back to its essence (an
almost fecal finger painting), it is as primitive and sophisticated as
everything this artist has done. A mystical melody that comes from the
hands, secret techniques with the movement, whatever comes into being is
already inscribed in the memory of the digits, as if the fingers are trained
for this moment. Agree or disagree with these pictures, there can be little
doubt that they are product of the most natural way of acting. And if the
results are that some not very nice things are spoken, at least we are
all spared from that most reprehensible baggage of painting: decoration.
The touch is the stroke is the painting is the picture, like a musician
at the piano or the fingering of a guitar, it’s a technique that invents
the form. A rapping on the table by hands that must remain unseen to maintain
the illusion of an otherworldly communication, there’s a skill here somewhere
between craft and chicanery. Healing by bringing out the toxic tumors and
ill humors of our dis-ease, Colo is the surgeon before the canvas (body),
even wearing surgical gloves to make these paintings, like the poet William
Carlos Williams, a doctor, who kept his poems short because he had to fit
them in between consultations.
In these deft hands, the stuttering of consciousness, each movement
a mark, every mark not part of a picture but a picture unto itself, each
picture a sentient being. The touch, the fingers, a phantasmagorically
bestial bio-diversity with an immense interior life. So often the scale
a kind of monumental immersive space, the artist not fidgeting here with
little bits of paper but working the ring like a boxer in a choreographed
arena of action. Quite literally (though it works metaphorically) Colo
is constantly looking backwards through a pair of binoculars at paintings
in which we have to step back to enter. Pictures made of pictures, Colo’s
clouds and drummings are like highly loaded Rorschachs deeply imbued with
subconscious emotions and imagery. Creatures that have been collected and
catalogued by the writer Borges in his folkloric anthology “The Book of
Imaginary Beings,” Colo finds them by deliberate accident and then, like
an ornithologist shocked by what he has seen, he runs to this field guide
to find out what it is. Rare creatures, they can always be found in every
culture, because if we did not have them we would have to invent them as
the fantasies of our paranoia. This is the fear we have to fear itself.
These are the characters taken out of the subtext of theater, the tattered
margins where the carnivalesque and grotesque reign. Where do these demons
come from if not from us? These are self-manifestations on a social order
made by a man who tells us that he paints his own madness because that
is what he knows. These are the animals that Noah refused to take on his
arc, memory reduced to myth, they survive the floods of culture only in
our dreams.
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