Trazos

Light is a creature, and one of its qualities is color. Air is another creature, and one of its qualities is form. Both light and air are in motion and interact. It can be said of Paulo Medina's art that he always seeks the style that is unique to him at each stage of his life. It can also be said that, as art historian Alois Riegl said, "Every style seeks a faithful rendering of nature and nothing more, but each has its own conception of nature."

      In trazos, the figure is geometric, fractal, characteristic of the patterns surrounding us in non-human creation, but it is also a figure in a sense that might seem more fanciful, more random. First, the pictorial work in strokes is akin and analogous to the stained-glass windows in Catholic churches—to the multitude of designs for parts or wholes from very diverse architectural traditions—to the desire for calligraphy and geometric art in mosques, as well as in their gardens, including fountains, to the mandalas of Hinduism and Buddhism. Second, its themes, it seems, are fabrics, again present in nature and in the body, from membranes or plant and animal tissues—under a microscope or with the naked eye—to leaves, mollusks, or cloud shapes, to the finest fabrics and textiles that are human-made. It matters little whether it's one or the other, just as it matters little whether it imitates, recreates, or resembles one's own internal body or is a perception of the external world—including the body—and, thus, sensorial. Either way, it is, and gives us, the meaning of things.

I'm a fan of Medina's work, there's no denying it. In his digital work, I highlight only two aspects that amaze me, which are perhaps values ​​I share with the artist: its luminosity, but also the depth of that same luminosity, its layered nature, like when, for example, one is at a certain depth in the sea and looks toward the surface or looks toward the bottom. It's strange to say this about an art whose medium—a question, it seems to me, is obligatory here—is binary information, a matter of ones and zeros. Which isn't so different from talking about oils and varnish, or about man as the combinatorial sum of a few elements.

     This work resonates for me with Klimt and Matthias, and to a lesser extent with Kandinsky. It's not like Pollock's action painting, although I suppose all art is physiological and neurological responses, and, as is evident in much Abstract Expressionism, it has a gestural character. If in Pollock it's bodily rhythm, like a graphic representation of the entire body, and an intuitive chromaticism, in Medina, it's more a matter of design, of color and form, its compositional and improvisational scope. The colors range from tender and soft, like watercolor, to bold, electric, and with a black background. There is an affinity in this work between the artisanal and the artistic, in which domestic objects—jewelry, embroidery, marquetry, all techniques in glass or clay—are not distinguished, but rather the decorative and the decorated object and the great works, as has been the case in many eras, including the Italian Renaissance. Then, from childhood, we seemingly innately seek out the shape in what we see: insects with long legs and wings like wasps, for example. There was only one image that struck me as dark, slightly disturbing. The organic and the biological are present in design, invention, fantasy. And how could they not be? When have Creation and creation, the Creator and the creator, ever been separated?

     It will be interesting to see how the image on the screen translates to the printed page. In all of the above, not only does the order of factors alter the result, but also, and more importantly, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Who is capable of creating a blade of grass ex nihilo? I conclude with a theme—a mystery—much explored in the Orthodox Christian tradition: the superabundance of creation, the beauty of infinity.

Roberto Ransom