Santiago de Paoli
Galerie Jocelyn Wolff
If the first noun in “Peintures et Hotline” (the title of Santiago de Paoli’s first solo exhibition in France) announced the paintings on view, the second referred to a binder of erotic drawings, undisplayed but available for viewing on request. The twenty-one oil paintings—variously on felt, wood, plaster, and ceramic—hung at different heights on the gallery’s white Sheetrock and exposed-masonry perimeter, save for two, Chaussettes à centre libre (Free Center Socks), 2018, which was set leaning against a wall, partially propped up by a stained cork, and Here you are, 2018, which lay horizontally on a deep, sun-filled windowsill. The display casually evoked a landscape with various objects in it; one French newspaper review likened the installation to wet laundry hanging on a line. In any case, the Argentinean artist often seemed to treat his paintings more like sculptural objects in a specific place than like two-dimensional windows onto another. The works’ small scale and the delicacy of Paoli’s brushstrokes, especially on unstretched swaths of felt, conveyed a physical lightness.
Many of the pieces also pictured a landscape of some kind, or else a still life that was somehow comparable to one: objects arranged on a side table or the anamorphic terrain of the artist’s palette. Chaussette maigre (Skinny Sock), 2018, and Country sock, 2017, depict open country-side, one casting it as brushy and wild, the other showing tightly manicured vegetation. Both works also featured the show’s recurrent image of a knitted sock, often functioning as a corner frame to a landscape vista. Works such as Hora sola (Single Hour), Early moons, Luz con flor (Light with Flower), and Cuadro con luz interior (Picture with Interior Light), all 2017, established a material link to the natural world. Paoli had built up their surfaces’ rich sculptural textures by layering organic matter—dried mushroom and dried dandelion, for example—or by burning wax candles close to the canvases to create dark veins of carbon.
But it is not necessarily into the materiality of the natural landscape that de Paoli’s work expands. As motifs (such as the socks) repeat across the works like the flickering of memories in deep REM sleep, the paintings conjure an erotic, uncanny dreamscape. Many of the objects that Paoli paints share a formal echo. The curve of the painted eggshells in works such as Interior light and City moons, both 2018, recurs variously in crescent moons, knee socks, and the cartoonish bulges of naked rear ends. Although the sketchbook, Hotline, 2008–2009, is full of them, cross sections of the nude body were present in only two paintings, Here you are, and Tiempo libre (Free Time), both 2018. Still, the sense of intense corporeal intimacy was present in works throughout the show, whether or not the human form was pictured. The bruised skin of the banana in Palette, 2018, for example, loomed like a battered appendage over a rendering of globs of paint on a porcelain plate. In Country sock, the tiny crescent moons painted at the tip of the sock suggested a row of toenail clippings. Woolly stockings implied the bare skin they cover. Elsewhere, Paoli evoked the nose—via thin lines of powder awaiting a rapid inhale: The innocent-sounding title of Luz con flor slyly ignored the fourteen lumpy slashes of white paint that suggested lines of cocaine prepared on a table. Like amemento mori forcing the proximity of pleasure and death, this detail brought the everyday up against a vast unknown. Reveling in the slow viscosity of oil paint, Paoli invoked a painterly surreality.