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Getting Medieval with Papo's Colosims
By Dominique Nahas
Let's begin by stating that the Coloisms series is an art of metamorphosis, of the uncovering of imagery through association and imaginative projection. I'm taken in by Papo Colo's mark making: an enraptured gutturalness and coruscate beauty that seethes and roils with a hellish ecumenical vision both excremental and sacramental. The artist's oneiric forms coalesce and come into focus as apparitions resembling biped as well as flying forms engage in either cruel and unusual activities (a beheading in Balancing Act) or silent and horrifying dramas filled with incomprehensible dread (Goya's Dog, Shaking Up), reproach (Hieronymous' House), or anticipation (Coloisms 1, Coloisms 3). Buzzing through each work are phantom figures such as demonic pratfalling entities, mysterious animalcules, weird infusoria, magnified grotesqueries, satan-like night shadows and visions. These figures are part of the seemingly aggregate and corpuscular surfaces whose marks and traces invoke a telescoped sense of historical and cultural space linked by diverse cross-references and associations.While sifting through the Coloisms' inventory of configurations, marks and shapes, we can find visual affinities or references to the metaphoric play of zoomorphic metamorphosis found in sixteenth century Flemish painting, nineteenth century caricature, children's doodles, art brut, underground komix, the formlessness of Bataillean surrealism, and the comic inventiveness of the CoBrA group -- all under the spell of a Nietzschean primitive irrational that permeates each painting.
Colo's is an art of accelerated and ecstatic excess, an art of decomposition and dispersal as well as radical recuperation. Colo is involved in a sensuous and near-ritualistic participation with materials and mark-making that is accumulative and microscopic in its intensity. His painterly project is performative at its core. It is fueled by a principle of automatism that effortlessly reanimates, transfigures, transforms, defaces and effaces, while simultaneously attempting inscriptions understood as libidinal residues. The traces that Colo leaves on his picture plane are at once demonic, apocalyptic, and buffoonish. These stances evince a post -modern subjectivity (itself subjected by an unceasing onslaught of roiling societal and cultural forces) characterized, as noted by Walter Benjamin, by "reception in a state of distraction."
Colo's new work can be seen as pictorial attempts to narrate-out (as in sweating-out or working-out) his fantasies, memories, accumulated impressions and sensations and make them congeal onto the surface of his Coloisms. These paintings are about excess, yet they are also about access: the accessing of an imaginative projection, symptomatic of the dream and of psychosis; the accessing of knowledge, history, memory, experience and materiality through an energetics of mark-making which depends on involuntary memory, free association, and reverie.
Papo Colo's "finger" paintings are wildly ambitious and tremulous images that are sensually controlled yet permeated by a self-ordained feverishness and frenzy. To call them "gestural" would let us off the hook too easily, even though the artist uses his hands dipped in dark paint to make marks on the canvas pressed against the floor. There are distinct body movements at play in these works, a syncopated rhythm to the marks. That rhythm is regulated by an energetics resulting from the mixture of controlled and directed strikes of the fingers with movements more akin to spasms or involuntary muscle contractions. The result is a spasmodic automatism, jittery with energy and chaos, which replaces the gracefully fluid arcs of paint of Jackson Pollock. Whereas Pollock's work binds or knits together a notion of universal space that seems infinitely expandable, the Coloisms invent a space that is strummed out, wrested away, scratched out of the body.
These rhythmic finger marks are then attached together and made semi-figural through the use of small brushes to demarcate place within space. In these arenas, as for example in Goya's Dog, Little House of Rembrandt, Jawas and Balancing Act, misshapen imagery begins to appear from the knitting together of marks. Demonic, carnivalesque and grotesque beings are what we see in an apocalyptic universe that is perpetually churning and ill at ease. Their protuberances and extensions recall the comical monsters and demons of the Romanesque period, where these underworld apparitions existed in counterpoint to the visual canon of Church-sanctioned sacramental imagery. It was during this epoch, and particularly within carnival time, that nightmare figures invoked a time and place set purposefully outside the norms of seeing and behaving. Fantasy and role reversals provided prescriptive alternatives to the established patterns and routines of everyday rituals, manners, and customs in the Catholic Church.
As outlined above, the saturnalian excesses and bodily deformities of Colo's world recall in spirit the works of Hieronymous Bosch, the 16th-century paintings of Peter Flotner, the murky ghouls of the 19th century English caricaturist James Gillray, and the quasi-automatic marks of Francisco Goya's Black Paintings and Carnival Folly. These precedents hold not-so-distant mirrors to late modern artists such as James Ensor, Robert Crumb, and Henri Michaux. Colo's work incorporates High Art references yet refuses to be bound by a purely canonical art-historical lineage. The Coloisms' cellular accretions, repetitive marks, and facial expressions in extremis recall, for example, pictorial characteristics favored by art brut painters Hauser and Koczy, "masters" of an entirely other "order": that of the unassimilable.
The Coloisms are powerful images precisely because they attempt to assemble the contours of a visual experience that expresses the beginning of a schemata taking form. An incunabula takes shape: a presencing that, while discernible, defies both description and categorization. If the new paintings before us are about any one thing, they're about testing the limits of interpretation. The timeless, ever-present space in Colo's work forms part of an altered reality that is both erotically charged and riddled with the fantastic: an element that, as defined by Tzvetan Todorov, gives license to “cross certain frontiers that are inaccessible so long as we have no recourse to it." The energetics of body movements and the syncopated tremors out of which Papo Colo realizes his emergent vision are at the core of this new work. It's through Colo's remarkable, tenebrous touch that we sense a breaking of the ground, or better yet a “grounding" of the body and materials from which emerge the telltale signs dividing the recognizable from that which is not. Papo Colo's work is not one of conformity. It is, instead, one of suggestibility.
With the initial tapping out of rhythmic forces through his hands, Colo "shakes" the image out of his body. His imagery seems torn loose, then reassembled sooty flake by sooty flake, as somatic energies are centered and pooled through the rhythmic gesturing of the hands. The resulting guttural and spectral imagery quakes and quavers in front of the viewer’s eyes and lingers in the mind. Coloisms are performative, instinctive, and profoundly humanistic works. These are exhilarating and hallucinatory paintings whose haunting, often terror-stricken bleakness is nevertheless filled with an inner pliancy and elasticity.
The primitivistic and ritualistic presence of the Coloisms recalls the primordial beginnings of images coalescing on cavern walls. The association of the handprints and granular imagery of the very first artist on the stone of the Lascaux caves with Colo's own play of hands reverberates with the significance of Henri Focillon's words in his 1934 essay, In Praise of Hands.
Watch your hands as they live their own free life. Forget for a moment their function, forget their mystery ... watch them in the sprightly elegance of pure and useless gestures... [the hand]...seems to gambol in utter freedom and to delight in its own skill....[that] exploits ...an unpredictable element beyond the realm of spirit, that is to say, accident.... left to themselves when the mind is active, [hands] move...stir the air....sometimes it happens that, first raised then lowered, one after another in invented rhythms, the fingers trace, nimble as dancers, choreographic bouquets.
The Coloisms' "choreographic bouquet" would be analogous to the thistle flower coming out of the anus of the 16th-century Flemish gentleman pictured in the anonymous Satirical Diptych (c.1520), a remarkably elaborate burlesque altarpiece belonging to the collection of the Université de Liège. In a sense, Colo also turns his backside to us, allowing us to ponder the deep space of the monstrous, the inchoate, and the impasse where the urge of connectedness and resolution vies for contention with that of chaos and the unresolved. In this respect it is useful to recall a passage in E.H. Gombrich’s Art and Illusion, a study of self-expression in which Gombrich analyzes the psychology of style by examining the liminal fields of visual ambiguities: ambiguities that tax to the limit categorical distinctions between "abstract" and "representational" syntactical elements. In referring to their role in our understanding of the psychology of style, Gombrich expresses his skepticism of the mind's ability and the eye's capacity for what he calls "the achievement of innocent passivity" in our comprehension of the world. He writes: “Whenever we receive a visual impression, we react by docketing it, filing it, grouping it in one way or another, even if the impression is only that of an inkblot or fingerprint." And in referring to the role of ambiguity in seeing, or the "vagaries of our perceptive expectations,” he notes: "If all seeing is interpreting, all modes of interpretation could be argued to be equally valid." The "effort after meaning" that allows us to "decode those cryptograms of the canvas" is for Gombrich at the core of what it means to be human, because it signals the power of language (visual or otherwise) to transform the world through the imaginative impulse. Seen in this light, Colo's recent paintings are provocations of the highest order. They incite the imagination to engage with the world.
The dark, near-medieval automatism that surges on and through Colo's pictorial planes makes manifest a current that attracts and repels the gaze, like magnetized iron fillings that follow pulses of subterranean energies. What we see are indeed currents of energies initiated by Papo Colo's tapping and strumming fingertip movements. With his hands covered in paint, Colo dances a chiaroscuro of what he terms "emotionalisms within a regulated image." These syncopations are put onto practice on a flatbed of horizontality, as canvas stretched over the floor becomes a drumhead on which the fingertips mark musical notations in paint as they strike the surface.
In Beyond Belief - The Museum as Metaphor, Ralph Rugoff describes L.A.'s The Museum of Jurassic Technology and its operative display methodology: offering the viewer what at first appear to be random, unrelated bits of (perhaps fictitious) information, which when pieced together in the mind of the viewer become an experiential Rorschach blot out of which associational meanings are induced. The museum's "seductive" visual information, consisting of tantalizing didactic material, becomes "a text to be translated, the scene of hidden meanings" whose metaphorical suggestiveness and uncertainty induce "minor paranoia’. The author continues:
...the uncertainty that the MJT instills in a viewer can produce what I call Stoned Thinking. When I refer to the Stoner, you may imagine someone poring over the cover of a rock album, decoding cryptic messages and its previously unconsidered cosmic implications. But the Stoner's rapture speaks of an experience of total involvement and immanent distraction...It's something close to a trance.
I'd propose that it is this altered state of mind or "trance" that gives the Coloisms their reach and power. Colo's initial imprints are those of drives and their motility, comprised of fluctuating hand tappings and tremors, gestures that shake out the spirit. His later additions of demarcation and boundary lines indicating physical space like rooms or horizon lines become indicators of teleological time or a universalizing ahistoricity. Colo sutures space together and then just as easily fragments and disperses it. His symbolic, gutttural visual language speaks eloquently of the connection and disconnection of body and mind. The meaning constructed through this language escapes the bounds of the "logics" of signification.
Attendant to the trance of Coloisms are the physical and psychic touching that immerse us in Colo’s work. In his recent paean to Jean Luc Nancy entitled Le Toucher (variously translatable as "Touch" or "Feeling"), Jean Luc Nancy, Jacques Derrida notes:
How to touch (get hold of) the untouchable? It would amount to, distributed under an indefinite number of forms and figures, a frequenting of the thought of touch - or, of thinking of thought itself as an intimate of touching. One can touch but a surface, that's to say, skin or the film - surface of a limit (and the expression " feeling one's limits,” "reaching for the limits" comes back to me irresistibly, as a leitmotiv, in many of Nancy's writings). But limitation, the concept of limit itself, by definition, seems deprived of the body. There is no meeting-point here, in dis-allowing touch, it either conceals itself from anyone or anything touching it, doesn't affect it or transgresses it forever.
The touching in Papo Colo's Coloisms is about a process that is not caught within its limits. It is a wandering process that strives towards meaning, however fragmented, yet constantly eludes it. The Coloisms refract a garrulous energy that is a private and mystic yet public dream realized. A mythic space coheres: trapped animals in Goya's Dog, a Satanic flaneur in Jawas, a red-lined scaffolding of psychic space in Balancing Act. These are myths realized out of private movements and private moments. These are narrations of the inchoate. Within these ghostly apparitions we perceive scenes of self-recognition and self-abandonment, of martyrdom, self-renunciation and self-reformation. Apotheosis and aporia vie for control in the spirit battles before the war, all sensed through Papo Colo's touch. This is performative work: line of action, line of attack, a caressing and tapping that is sensitive and intuitive and results in ... what?
Incunabula? Visual glossolalia ? You bet.
Coloisms mark the shaking down of the storm. It is epic and moving and horrifying. Stirring and soul-stretching and soul-splitting. It is a fiery hand-stepping.
Coloisms: can we talk about a spirit walk?
Coloisms: can we walk within the spirit talk (spirits talking)!
Colo is in a turbulent, incantatory, inner-directed world (spellbinding, mystagogic trickster).
Papo Colo, his knuckles bloody after painting. For Kandinsky painting becomes music. Colo reverses this: music becomes painting.
Coloisms: passionate inebriation. These works unearth something repellent and yet magisterially true, a personal archaeologizing. They are Papo Colo’s underworld brought to light.
It is a site worth seeing.
Dominique Nahas
July 2000
New York City
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