Paper artworks of Tobias Putrih and Abraham Cruzvillages in the Centre Pompidou

Truth be told, I immensely enjoyed my visit to the Centre Pompidou in Paris not so long ago. I happily washed my eyes with awesome brutalist post-modern architecture, a rich variety of Contemporary Art and the grand retrospective exhibition of French artist Martial Raysse. Yet only when I discovered that the museum had selected works of paper art, did my heart truly began to race!

works of Martial Raysse

The exciting installation of Abraham Cruzvillegas included 175 pieces of found paper items: newspaper clippings, postcards, tickets, vouchers, posters, flyers, envelopes, letters, napkins, recipes and photographs he collected from around the world. These were layered in thick monochrome white acrylic paint and pinned on the museum wall as a visual poem.

Paper artwork of Abraham Cruzvillegas

Cruzvillages, a key artist within the Mexican contemporary art scene and best known for his artwork “Autoconstruccion”, uses found materials to explore specific local areas within a social and economic context. This particular work is part of his “Blind Self Portrait” series. The series involves a paradox: how to represent oneself without revealing oneself. It is a rethinking of the very nature of a self-portrait – how it hides more than it unveils.

The other paper artworks belonged to the young New-York based Slovenian artist Tobias Putrih, a graduate of the “Kunstacademie” Dusseldorf, Germany. Putrih is known for his work with everyday materials, creating fragile structures from small modular works to giant installations. The Centre Pompidou displayed a series of artworks entitled “Times” (in reference to the so-called newspaper, as each work contains the date of each issue). Putrih used his old newspapers and converts them into art pieces. The papers, or the letters and images of the paper medium, are consequently transformed into unstructured forms, freed from “meaning”.

Paper artworks “Times” by Tobias Putrh

What excites me most in both artists’ works is the process of how they used paper items (old newspapers, letters, posters, etc.), which are common paper objects and a representation of our reality, and then transformed them into artistic creations, giving the paper a new identity, life, and pulse.

photo courtesy: PaperArtView