OBSESIONADOS POR ENCAJAR 16/09/2021
AND YOU, WHAT DO YOU WANT TO BE?
Some paintings are born in the most unexpected place, and travelling, and through the vicissitudes of life, end up on the canvas. That point outside the work, where art originates, can be a banal act, a unique experience, perhaps a shock, also a novel, a story, a song, a trend, a building, the scene of a film, a perplexity, a dream, an obsession, a news item on the radio, a simple object, anything, really. It is never easy to know where and how art begins. The beginnings are always confusing. It is easier to see where something ends than to establish when it was born. In any case, behind each painting one can guess a long journey, an idea in movement.
In Paula Vincenti´s painting, the suspicion of this unusual journey is heightened. You feel like asking "But Paula, where have you been? How did you get here? You understand everything a little better, however, when she explains that her references are on the one hand changeable, mutable, that reality drags to her by chance, and on the other hand immutable, like Raymond Carver´s stories, Barbara Kruger´s graphic designs, Murakami´s grammar, Murakami´s grammar, the work of Murakami and the work of Murakami, the grammar of Murakami, the sophistication of Scott Fitzgerald, the random worlds of Paul Auster, the performances of Sophie Calle, cities like New York or New Orleans, the music of Coltrane, Miles Davis, Liza Minelli, The Beatles, Metallica, or PJ Harvey.
The intense journey of her ideas, the influences, in short, the artist that she is in the end, make her painting a great text full of voices. Her style often appears in the form of an entire novel, with its three hundred and fifteen pages, let´s say, and all the characters, plots, dialogues, metaphors, suppositions, concealments, expressive discoveries that fit in those margins. The picture is filled with planes, figures, objects, colours, complexities, jokes. Chaos seems to reign, but everything is organised. Things end up not being, as is appropriate in art, simply what they appear to be. In fact, behind what appears to be an affable plan, there beats a devastating idea. The attractive universes, full of colours, texts, stylised figures, buildings, even playful elements, are in the end nothing more than a slap in the face of the terrible, consumerist, devouring society we have created.
The need for change that any art carries within, as a raison d´être, surely as destiny, puts us now before a Paula Vincenti who continues to wonder about the present, for the place it occupies, the role that today represents the individual, how it aspires to be located and survive in the face of success, uncertainty, individualism or romantic love as the big questions in which the world we have forged considers that identity resides. It is a long human stubbornness to say "this is who I am". It doesn´t matter what you are like, or why. "Here, have a cigar, light it up and be somebody," one of the characters in Pete Kelly´s blues recommended to a friend.
Such an obsession, to carve out an identity moulded to the times, to create and elevate our place in the world, is a fanaticism that is beginning to eat away at us sooner and sooner. A couple of years ago, in my daughter´s school playground, in the middle of the afternoon, I heard one of her classmates, almost four years old, say that when she grew up she wanted to be a "psychiatrist", like her uncle. And you, Helena, what do you want to be", I asked my daughter, expecting anything. "Nothing," she replied with an icy interest in the future. In a world full of ambitious, artificial, insatiable individuals, such as those recreated in this exhibition by Vincenti, the aspiration to be nothing perhaps denotes a certain character, I like to think.
Xoán Tallón. Journalist and writer.
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