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Internal Drumming / Chanting the Dark Side:
Papo Colo's Large Canvases
Robert C. Morgan
These new surreal/expressionist paintings by legendary artist and performer Papo Colo project a strong sense of pictorial rhythm. They are vibrant paintings informed by a clearly-defined kinesthetic structure. For Colo, painting is the art of action. It is a performance. He is not interested in the static approach. His paintings appear to move, twist, and turn inside out.. The figurative shapes go in all directions. They are abundant with energy, wit, provocation, and dismay. They open up feelings of solitude-- that indigenous Latin existentialism fraught with romantic intrigue.
Colo is an originator. His unique process of painting involves covering his fingers with latex gloves which he then dips into black enamel. He applies the paint to a large canvas placed directly on the floor by drumming his paint-spattered fingers against it. This is achieved while moving around the canvas on his knees, braced by two large pads.
Colo’s aesthetic predisposition comes close to the Happenings of the early Sixties, specifically in relation to Allan Kaprow’s interpretation of Jackson Pollock. Kaprow understood Pollock primarily in terms of how he moved physically in relation to the painting. Much the same can be said about Colo. His process involves getting inside the surface of the painting through the sound of drumming, hearing his fingers beat against the floor.
In order to feel Colo’s paintings, one has to let down the barriers that separate mind from body. This is not an easy task in these academic days of cyber-materialism. Was it not Emerson who once exclaimed: “Things are in the saddle. They ride mankind.” If there was ever a salutary antidote, a counterpoint to the kind of society implied in Emerson’s phrase, that painterly spirit is embodied in the aesthetic of Papo Colo. Yet his aesthetic is in no way an anti-aesthetic. He is not trying to detach himself from the spirit of the paintings. His approach is quite the contrary. He wants the work to come alive, to be felt, to offer sustenance to the viewer. His performance is an intimate affair in time and space; yet Colo wants the intrinsic intimacy of his hammering fingers to bring results, to offer a magic potion, an elixir, an alchemical flow of breath and light.
There are some critics who disdain this approach. Some abstract painters who survived Postmodernism are looking for a more theoretically correct avenue to pursue, an avenue that exemplifies a certain historicity, a palimpsest of signs, an historical disjuncture given to fragmentation and disinterestedness. This kind of rhetoric began in the Eighties; in other words, detachment became a virtue, a means towards repressing what was necessary to the psyche. (Ironically, some painting labeled “Neo-Expressionism” ran quite opposite from this rhetoric.) Colo’s paintings do not want to dispel anything. They are about the process of reconstituting painting as a brilliant art -- an art that is inspired, intuitive, magical -- without despair. As with the Dadaists, these paintings are against middle class intellectualism.
Just listen to these paintings sing! Listen to the heartbeat, the whirlwind, the abandon. Get into their darkness, the way one might get inside one of the “miserable miracles” of the great painter/poet Henri Michaux! One may see figures, holy figures, howling figures of the night, drug-eaten, worm-eaten, pulverized figures of the underworld, Dante’s figures, figures of the festival of death, the circle of rebirth, figures that crouch and spew and spit and shit and fornicate, figures that are disemboweled, scatological figures, figures that are signs (in the most personal sense) of a brave new eschatology of wonder, in praise of the human spirit, an enduring spirit that delights in the creative potential of the self, the spiritual self so forsaken in these cyber-materialist days of emptiness and inner-strife, days of disease, wretched, rampant conformities, digitized omens, heart-bleed, days being torn asunder by the separation of mind from body.
What Papo Colo brings to life in these paintings is a new heraldry -- a heraldry that is both literal and metaphorical. The message is that we are all of the same world, the same species with the same fundamental necessities and desires. The iconic strength of these paintings is not solely within the conscious realm. Their true ironic value emanates from the unconscious. It is not so far removed from the great Max Ernst who borrowed from Oskar Dominguez the idea of frottage and decalcomania. In these works, Ernst tried to show the structure of psychic automatism, tried to reveal the revelation of how painting could become a grandiose gesture of cosmogenetic reality, a force of substantive will, an indulgence that would not become an end in itself but a revolving cyclical episode of humankind’s need to wonder, to expel the grief of the Ego in favor of an acceptance of the dark side of the self, thereby arriving at the fountain of spiritual necessary that we all crave.
What begins as the impulse foments the reality, the spiritual transformation from impulse to expression (a paradigm from the philosopher John Dewey). But to get there, to get into the surface of these figures, these images of the dark-side, is the trick. For Papo Colo, the existential meaning is transmitted through the movement of hand and body, the internal drumming, the sequence, the pulsation that brings the mind to create, to approach the threshold of the real and the non-real, to explode the fantasy of memory, of history, into a single romantic conjugation, if only for the minute that the fingers are hammering those pigments on to the surface. Colo’s pictorial means is a unique one. Here in the midst of a world in which painting has been debased comes the resurgence of a painterly spirit, the embodiment of the act of painting, the action of the pulse striving to make the image happen, the image within the figure, the figure that demands the self to be absent in order to be present. What Colo offers is another way of looking, an arbitrary means to get in touch with what is happening through the surface of the paint, to explore the dark-side, to see that within this exploration is a shower of meteors descending through the emotional turmoil, a belief that feeling transpires within the action of art, even in the substratum of the dark side.
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