Paulo Vinluan’s latest solo exhibition explores the idea and quality of “objectness”, through a series of works in paper on paper, shaped canvas, and animation videos. The artist reflects on the act of image-production, exploring points where both material and narrative, image and surface intersect. Vinluan narrates how the exhibition developed from a personal archive and amalgam of images accumulated over the years, comprised of random and disparate collections that he constantly revisits in order to seek links between the physical qualities of things. His works, which are generally characterised by their graphic and linear style of imagery, explore the material quality of being an object through the use of the curved sphere as a surface of painting and the use of a knife to painstakingly cut away painted sheets of paper before pasting them onto a larger sheet. These methods and technical interventions transform painting and drawing into more sculptural and three-dimensional media. “My brush follows this curved surface…and color itself becomes an object held in my hand,” Vinluan writes of this process from flatness towards tactility. In the end, his explorations produce works where the narrative is inscribed in the very physical and material qualities of the work itself.

(Lisa Ito)