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The Colo Way
By Jeanette Ingberman
"In every finger there is a brush, in every dance there is a finger, in every force there is a thought, in every gesture there is a calculation." -Papo Colo
Colisms is a new way of painting that has led Papo Colo toward a new method of constructing a painting and forming images on the canvas. How? The canvas lies unstretched on the floor and later hung on the wall, the dimensions are quite large 10 by 15 feet. Colo places himself inside the space of the painting, first making a sketch with pencil and then drumming his paint-dipped fingers against the canvas covering it with strokes. The marks he constructs are physical evidence, a trajectory his fingers make as they trace his process. One experiences a flowchart that can’t be followed, a storm of strokes that creates images. From these abstract strokes figures emerge, howling faces that appear to be from another dimension - an indecipherable stage of actors. The paintings reflect a story of beauty that could also be hell, a terrorvision that morphs into what Colo terms “a beauty of meditation.“ A fury. Controlled. Intelligent. Sensual. A story, a play, unfolds inside each canvas as these painted apparitions evolve.
In using his fingers as brushes, and his palms as a palette knife, Colo's technique draws from his knowledge of musical instruments, of years of playing the keyboard and the guitar and of traditional painting with brushes and palette knife. Music requires the direct interaction between body and instrument without a mediating element. In these paintings, Colo simultaneously uses the brush and replaces it with his body. The paintings require great physical effort and discipline. For Colo this process brings him to a state of nirvana, what Colo terms "a trance of the mind with the precision of a marksman. The mental shaping the physical.“ The painting are the effervescent of that shock.
This way of painting is part of a broader continuum that blended interdisciplinary practices. Colo draws from his work in performance art and music. Colo is a painter who is also a character that is an actor, a musician, and a performer. He is also an impresario of culture as director of Exit Art. . Colisms is a synthesis of all these personas and interests. Colo’s commitment is not to any one medium, but rather he is a committed practitioner of the inter-relation of all these mediums – or what Colo likes to say, “a trickster.”
For Colo these works are a unique but hybrid form of painting as it draws upon different media. A true hybrid is the acceptance of the other in equal conditions. In Colo's new paintings we find an equal mixing and interlocking combination of abstraction and figuration, of drawing and painting, of mark making and strokes. The discourse of historical representation that moves him goes from the medieval portraits of Goya to the Hollywood science fiction ‘star wars’. An invention of an image that translates cultures into the many languages of Colo. Each painting shares an immediacy, a sense of rushing around, a wildness that is not tamed, but cautious, watching, studying its next move. However, the work never loses control. As an iconoclast, Colo is a lion devouring canvas with his hands and concepts with his mind, laughing loud inside his body, an anomaly, extra fine, brutal, muscular, alone and delicate. We witness Colo dancing on top of canvas with his gloved hands dripping, his mind traveling in many directions. These paintings are the physical embodiments of Colo’s way. As he says, “Mystery is my business. For me art has an option to a new spirituality. Reinventing the rules of applying paint on the canvas and the attitude of confronting the forms that are inside the painting. Questioning the purpose of pop art - deep thoughts versus superficiality, easy images versus enigmatic images, performative work versus manufactured ideas.”
With the music inside his head fueling the pulsations of the movement of his hands, these works illustrate a relationship between performance, painting, music and dance. The paintings are a result of the combination of all these things in one body controlling improvisations – Colo’s version of conceptual painting. (One of Colo’s heroes is the pianist Keith Jarret.) With its predecessors in the Surrealist games such as automatic writing, or the incongruity of Dada performance, and to the obvious school of action painting, Coloisms rest at the precipice of the 21st century as a summing up of all that was influential during the 20th century.
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