I'll come to a new episode of Arteculations.
I am Tamara Chalabi, co-founder of Iterarte, and with me today is the artist and poet Paolo
Colombo from Athens, Greece.
I will be discussing with Paolo his upcoming exhibition at Burt Gallery in Los Angeles
that takes mosaics as its subject, meticulously created in watercolours using Paolo's singular
technique of dots and squares, as he recalls newses from antiquity.
And in this exhibition is one work that is a variations collaboration with Itterarte,
entitled After Gold.
It is a work of embroidery using an elaborate technique from the Indian Himalayas.
Embroidery is an art form that Paolo especially loves and refers to as humble, an adjective
he often uses to also describe his own work.
Paolo Colombo was born in 1949 in Turin, Italy.
He lives and works in Athens, Greece.
He received a degree in languages and literature from the University of Rome in 1975, but the
formative years of his painting and drawing practice were self-taught.
In 1977, Colombo was the first European artist to exhibit at PS1 New York.
From 1986, he worked as a curator in museums across the United States, Switzerland, Italy,
Greece and Turkey.
After a 25-year hiatus, Colombo took up his personal work as an artist again, coinciding
with a move to Greece.
His work has since been exhibited at several international galleries and international
fairs.
Paolo, thank you so much for joining me today to discuss your new mosaic project, which
is very exciting and one that I find extremely beautiful.
It's a true pleasure to be talking to you and looking forward to your participation.
Yes, and I'm very happy, like the most days, which is the latest expansion of my work.
Paolo, can I start by asking you why you started painting, why you wanted to become a painter
all those years ago?
Yes, definitely.
The beginning was sudden and unexpected.
I just turned 12 years old and I was actually sent to boarding school in a mountain in Switzerland.
And all that was there was a boarding school in a farmhouse and for 20 kilometers, no other
living human being other than cows.
And the 200 boys that were in school, it was a very small class, had three children.
The other two were older than I was, so it was almost like in a class.
The teacher who looked at me like she'd done that, but turned out she was 20, so only about
eight years older than I was.
I sure as day said we should buy a pad of watercolor paper and gouache by Carondage,
paintbrush and maybe two paintbrushes, pencils, eraser.
And then we went to the first class and it's all just to find the center of the page, which
was the intellectual thing to do, almost conceptual.
And then the next class, he came with a book and he said, please seek the dictation.
And the book was Tonia Clark, by Thomas Mann.
And he read four lines in which Tonia Clark, who's already a grown man, is on a beach in
Northern Germany and looking up the North Sea, a windy day, a gray day, he's leaning
on a boat on the shore and across the sand, far away on the beach, he sees two shakers
and he recognizes the two nose of his son, Hans Havisen, the beautiful blue-eyed, white
young man, and Inge Håne, the beautiful blue-eyed blonde young man.
And he sees him kissing from the distance.
And then the teacher whose name is Innocente Yannis, says, okay, now illustrate it.
And I knew then and there that that's what I wanted to do for the rest of my life.
We kept on having classes with him and he would read a bit of a small section of a novel
and ask us to illustrate it, give us advice on how to paint grass or how to paint trees.
And it's just effective.
And tell me, he spoke to you in which language?
He read these books and these verses in Italian.
It was all in Italian, even though I was in the German part of Switzerland.
But the school had a small Italian section of about 35 students.
We were only three in my class.
So it was very, very reduced and full immersion with the teacher.
Strangely, we kept in touch with Innocente.
Yeah, that's my teacher.
And still today I send him invitations and I send him images of my work.
How lovely.
And do you think this was the reason that connected in your mind the text and image?
Because it's very present in your work.
I ended up studying literature, so texts in Innocent.
Likewise, as you know, I occasionally write.
So it's probably the moment, yes.
And it's the moment in which it came together and gave me like an infinite pleasure and
inspiration.
And I remember looking outside at the trees from the classroom and thinking while I was
doing the paint.
Yeah, I think that really was the moment in which I had the first experience of absolute
pleasure and to end my life.
Would you say he was the greatest artistic influence on you?
Really?
Can you share a few?
I love lots of things.
I love classical art, as you know, I like the early mosaics, I like Byzantine art.
And I feel very much at home in a world without the shared dimension.
I like an American 19th century painter called Martin Johnson Heade who painted orchids in
the Amazon.
I also like that person, I love Kulak and Dinsky, certainly anything geometric.
And then, when I was about 21, I had this chance to do the Italian sculptures, they
was Fausto Medorti.
You mentioned him before.
We had long talks, you see, and in fact, he wrote the introduction to my first show in
the Castle Up, which was like a complete honor because on top of that, he would be a great,
great artist.
He was a great writer and he wrote beautiful types of art.
So he certainly was an interest, but there might have been so many more, but I don't
even know if there were even a hero.
But would you say, was it a specific decade that especially influenced you growing up?
I mean, I know you were born in Torino, even though you went to school in Switzerland.
Was there a particular kind of minimalism or this pitura anal dica or was that?
It was not part of the artistic discussion until I was about 25.
In the meantime, I studied literature, there's a wonderful poem by Joseph Harris, who really
was an incredible artist, in which he says, and let me paraphrase him, nowadays, so much
gold around the art and around the words that can be the grace to speak simply.
And that was like a great lesson for me.
Yeah, there have been different moments.
I came to Greece, it was my first trip to paint and seeing the light, the people, the
energy, the music from somebody who has spent eight years on top of that.
It was, yes, one of those moments of completed recognition of who you are.
And it happened a few times, the first time I came to Greece, the first time I went to
Greece, there have been moments like that.
There is a wonderful line in P.S.
Eliot, who also was a complete revelation, started him as part of my industry, as you
could call it.
And I think Bill Banks says, from the John Quartet, says, in memory only, reconsidered
passion, which again made me think of the role of memory in all that we do.
And all that we feel, of course.
Yeah, there are moments that really opened the doors, as Cicely says, chancastic, she
lines.
So, finding these moments, I was blessed by a number of other people.
Tell me, when you are working, when you're painting and you're maybe trying to find
that moment again, whenever you start painting, you are in the middle of the work.
Where do you go?
Where does your mind go?
Let me see.
I actually never tried to find this moment, because I know they have some new expectations.
When I paint, I just wish to be light when I step.
I listen to things, I listen to music, I listen to books, audio books, but I also listen to
silence, but mostly I think of other paintings that I want to paint.
And as my paintings take so long to make, by the time I finished painting, I saw the
radio fire of the paintings today.
And I tried, I decided that surely they're not good, I'm not going to make them.
So you never have an artist block situation?
No, never.
Never had it.
So lucky.
I always felt I had so much to say, and the problem was not having enough time to say.
And sometimes you postpone things and then it's too late even to say it, I should slow
it.
And I like silence, and I think about new paintings, but I also like music and more,
and books.
I wanted to talk to you about your new project, or rather new body of work that's been very
focused on mosaics.
Why mosaics?
So I'm spending hours here, it's very long work to make.
Now I'm working on a piece with small mosaic pieces, as if they were stones.
I tend to mimic these watercolors, mosaics that are made of stones, not of glass.
So we tend to be of the older Greek and Roman tradition and pre-Christian tradition of mosaics
with glass.
So, Paolo, one thing that is really interesting is how often mosaics are referred to as eternal
pictures, because that technique that was developed all those millennia ago actually
hasn't really changed very much in its application.
And I'm really interested in the way that you are kind of almost transferring that technique
while still very much imitating it, as you say, but almost carrying it to yet another
medium.
And I'm wondering what that means to you, or how do you see the mosaic visually when
you see it on paper versus on stone?
Well, first of all, I think what's interesting to me is that it's not a mosaic, it's a picture
of a mosaic.
It's a representation of a mosaic.
So you are going to reach immediately a second degree in which the mosaic is a fiction versus
a mosaic, even though I paint each individual tessera, but it is the portrait of a mosaic.
So in that sense, the transferring to another medium makes it, at least to me, more significant
because it creates on one side a distance and on the other side a proximity with it,
because it's right there.
I mean, I have these mosaics in my hands.
I'm actually touching them as I make them, not in a different way than when the real
mosaic people, mosaic makers, made them.
What is uncanny to me is one broke and square tessera of mosaics of all different colors
and how I'm trying to imagine what the palette of a mosaic maker was to be with different
colors, different gradations.
So even the logistics of it must have been quite amazing.
On top of that, the glue, which was some sort of cement that you put underneath the petals,
was to be given for the day in which you put them in because it dried afterward.
I imagine the mosaics is not only what you see, therefore a very flat piece of stone,
but they're slown, they slightly have more body enough to penetrate into the sword.
Most mosaics were done with a larger extent on the floor.
Tell me, Paolo, you have said you're very concerned about your art being sober and
austere and somehow the connection with the dot and the square and what that ascribes
to sort of the meaning of things in terms of symbolic and divine.
Obviously, the square here is also connected to the mosaic and I'm just curious about
that progression that you have had with your work.
Yeah, totally.
I think that's where my initial work, which was literally based on dots and small painted
squares and lines, the national progression piece in my case was to come to full-fledged
mosaics.
And now, actually, my point of view is slightly changing because the big part of the show
in Los Angeles is mosaics, which are paintings that are supposed to be upright.
And what you see is the detail of a mosaic through a fabric which is also painted against
imitation of mosaics, imitation of fabric and the illusion that the fabric is torn and
you can see the mosaic underneath the fabric.
Right now, I'm working on a mosaic which is a floor piece.
And what colors are you using?
Just describe to me.
Well, lots of…
I can't see it right now, but…
Because white stone was a prevalent stone in the Roman mosaics and it is a mosaic that's
inspired from the unswept floors mosaic of ancient Rome, which was for, I apologize,
mosaics of messes of people at the table who dropped the shells of sea urchins and the
whole fish on the floor.
You know, I mean, the Romans did not have the table manners that we have today.
But you're obviously talking about a location that is near the sea.
It's near the sea.
Not too far anyway, because the crustaceans and sea urchins and squid deteriorate very
fast without refrigeration.
And so near the sea.
And I actually was fascinated by…
But these mosaics had depicted various pleasures.
The seashells.
You mean gastronomy now.
Can you see it?
Yes, beautiful.
Anyway, this is the idea.
I'm fascinated by this interest for past pleasures and also the tom-pleur characteristic of a
shack that it's supposed to be a very clean mosaic floor that represents filth.
And so the idea is that these floor mosaics, the Russian hero, are not rectangular mosaics
paintings like my paintings are.
But they actually have a shape of puddles.
When it rains, I go around and look at the shape and dimensions of puddles.
And it's like a mosaic puddle that is very flat on the floor, kept very flat on the floor
by a very thick and heavy glass, about one centimeter.
And this one is the size of a large puddle.
And it is as if underneath a floor you would scratch and find a mosaic from the previous
floor.
So it's like the idea is to make these mosaic puddles that are literally floor pieces and
not wall pieces.
But tell me, you said that you're quite interested in having or in depicting these past pleasures
that were themselves depicted in these mosaics, such as a feast or the joy of food or a celebration
or a moment.
On the one hand, these moments are very fleeting and yet what's left is meant to be eternal.
And where do your paintings fit in this?
Well, the issue of time is very much embedded in my work.
It takes time to make them and basically 33 seconds to see them.
The idea is that I try to capture the feeling of fleeting as much as possible, whether it
is in a verse, in a poetic verse, whether it is in my paintings, which are made of text.
And at first, in the 70s, I made the text.
It was basically done by a compression of dots on a very thickly dotted page as if it
were written in sand or appearing in fog and it could disappear the exact next second.
So this idea of something that is fleeting and therefore even more meaningful to us is
very much… it connects at least with what I've been doing.
Yeah, I'd like to think that the time is not actual.
It's more like a spiral.
But therefore, I'm always trying to think when I see ideas or concepts which I had from
the beginning still re-appearing and this is just an idea of something that's very
fleeting.
And even the shape of a puddle also indicates that it is as fleeting as a puddle.
Right, right.
Well, I think quantum physicists would agree about the non-linearity or the non-unidirectional
relationship with time or the meaning of time, so to speak.
Can you just walk us through this exhibition that you're having which is essentially of
mosaics but I think predominantly of characters, of goddesses, of gods, of classical figures.
Can you introduce us to your crew?
You know, faces that I like, that I respond to, that move me.
So they may not be major gods or goddesses but I like to think they may be nymphs or
nereids or yes.
Well, I haven't made a try-telling yet but maybe, you know, the idea is minor gods.
Think of them.
Less creatures, still much higher than us.
And what are their names?
They all have a name.
When I pay, it's...
Yeah, I like the idea of anonymity.
They have a minor god that is anonymous and really today we have no idea.
Nymphs were not immortals.
But nymphs just lived very, very, very, very long time.
And I don't know if they changed or tried and I don't know if they became something
less than a handsome young man or...
You mean that they had eternal youth?
Yeah.
I'm not sure they had eternal youth.
I think at one point they aged.
According to the legend, they aged very slowly.
And what is it that when you are capturing a nymph, let's say, what is it, I mean, you're
inspired by this repertoire of images across time and archaeology, but at the same time,
what is it that you're interested in depicting in terms of their faces?
Because often it's a portrait.
It's not necessarily the full body.
It's a portrait because they're in post and it's no more to be too literal.
You know, it's like face disappearing through a cane of fabric.
So not really about the whole body, the tail in the fabric and usually at face level.
To be an arm could be a hand.
Gosh, if I think about it, nymphs had a horrible life.
They were the desire of ardent gods and they tried to run away most of the time.
And the lucky one got changed into a suit, a syringe, for example, or into a daphnia.
Yes, and they had what appears to be a fairly different life in spite of the fact that they
live in Arcadia.
Right.
And do you ever, I mean, do you have a favorite amongst your mosaics?
I don't like to sell them.
I don't like to give them away.
The only thing is to make doubles.
Right.
And so speaking of doubles, I think it's probably a good moment to explore the sort of collaboration
that we're doing with these beautiful embroideries.
Let me say something.
That this is not a first collaboration.
We collaborated as curators.
Important because I don't think I would ever have asked anybody else to collaborate the
way we are if I didn't have absolute trust in your eye and in the grace to which you
approach art.
Thank you, Paolo.
Yeah, don't have a bad character, but I have a character.
Sometimes it's not too easy.
That intimacy, that actual process in terms of that information to yet another medium,
because we, especially when we have been working on the mosaic variations, I mean, it's such
an incredible further translation.
There is a constant evolution that's fascinating.
Well, it's a big sad worry because I did embroider a few watercolors in the seventies, like in
72.
Embroider a column on a watercolor.
And I really didn't know how to go about it.
So I tried to buy the thinnest needle, but the watercolor paint was fake.
It was just like I was learning by trial and error.
Color would maintain on the thread anyway, but I did try.
And then the idea came because of the nature of things here.
You just lose or end up not knowing where your work is, but you have photographs.
And I think we thought together the idea of recreating this work that was gone in the
form of embroidery, which is probably how many women maintained their memories embroidering
from sheets.
I thought this would really fit the project.
And I felt a bit uneasy because the first time I'm doing something, which I'm not doing
myself, my head.
So yeah, the drought had to be infinite.
I mean, I find it so exciting because I think there is almost another ethereal nature to
these embroideries.
They're so delicate.
And your work, it is so delicate to begin with.
And yet this further iteration is even, I mean, it has a very almost lofty quality about
it.
There's precious because the workmanship is even more.
I think they're done with love.
Fantastic, fantastic people.
They're done with love and you can see it.
I hope they enjoy doing it.
I hope they get something out of doing it in terms of participating to make something
be, which until it was done, I had no idea it could turn out this way.
Yeah.
But what does it, I mean, how do you relate to this work that is very much yours, but
not made by you, but also made by hand, also made painstakingly like your work is made
very laboriously and slowly?
I think it's very similar the way they work in a very similar way to when I work.
So I would say yes, I love it.
And I think it's a great new iteration.
So I'm extremely happy with it.
Now the try is to introduce one in an exhibition of paintings.
By the way, all the paint is a watercolor in washes, which is all I use my whole life.
I think it's a super presence within a show and probably an unexpected one.
And the first time I'm doing this, so we'll see soon in a week.
What?
Shall we talk about color?
About color.
We didn't talk about color.
Well, listen, color is very important because I only made watercolors and drawings, but
even the drawings, I switch to colored pencils right away.
I am not a...
What are the colors that you find most?
They change every time.
You know, like with the days, some days I'm in love with red and some days I'm in love
with blue.
Some days I'm in love with the name of a color.
It's a fantastic color, which is composed of magentas and indigos, which coming together,
it becomes like a very, very dark blue.
Yeah, you can feel that there is a heat of the magenta.
It's from a company where I buy my colors.
It's called Daniel Smith.
What's the color called?
What's in...
Okay, the color is called Moonglow.
Moonglow?
Yeah.
I used it in many paintings in particular.
How beautiful!
I love to open the two.
But do you think going back to mosaics, does it limit your choice of color?
Of course, trying to mimic mosaics which are made with stones, yes, pretty much the color
of stones a billion has.
Because I think these mosaics at one point, they received water, they were wax, but anyway
to make the color stronger.
But yeah, there's lots of...
There's gray, there's brown, there is...
Yeah, and occasionally some purple.
I imagine very little because the pair is a very precious stone, and blue, and love
color.
I think I could not work with that color.
I look forward to seeing a painting of yours that will be an ode to Moonglow.
Thanks to you.
Now it's going to be in the works.
Great.
Well, Paolo, listen, good luck with the show.
I'm very excited to see the responses to your beautiful mosaics.
Thank you so much.
Thank you for joining us and our collaboration.
I'm going to leave you to finish this work because you need it for the show.
Yeah, it will be in touch very soon.
Ciao.
Ciao ciao ciao.