Logbook I. Works on Paper at the CAAM Colletion

Exhibition title: Logbook I. Works on Paper at the CAAM Colletion
Curator: Omar-Pascual Castillo and Mari Carmen Rodríguez
Dates: 22.11.2013 to 02.02.2014
Place: CAAM – Los Balcones 11. Planta 0. Las Palmas de Gran Canaria. Spain.
Produce: Centro Atlántico de Arte Moderno, Cabildo de Gran Canaria
Hours: Tuesday to Saturday from 10am to 9pm. and Sundays from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m.

In the History of Art, works of art have been made on paper since the creation of the first Egyptian papyrus scrolls and the first parchments. Paper and its ductility, its textures, its fragility and sturdiness: from the very beginning, this is a material that artists have been handling for over three thousand years until achieving professional mastery. They have used paper to capture their obsessions, experiments and visual pursuits. Paper has served as a logbook, a sketchbook, a notepad. Just as anthropologists and pan-humanists of past centuries used to write notes during their research trips –before the advent and systematized use of photography, documentary cinema and/or video documents–, so have artists recorded their visual graphologies on this medium: paper. This practice shows their most fragile, honest and off-guard side, but also the most intimate and thorough.

That is why paper conveys this evasive, unprejudiced quality, free from the solemnity inherent to sculpture or painting. Works of art made on paper have the added value of a primal rarity, a germinal enigma: they represent the early sprouts, even the early blossoms, of something that, in time, shall become a vast creeper. Throughout its twenty five years of existence, CAAM has enriched its collection with over one thousand works made with and on paper.

In some of them, the artists simply resorted to paper as a suitable material to trace their usual lines and sketches, just making use of the advantages offered by it. On other occasions, they have paid special attention to the nature of paper to challenge it, and sometimes they have used it as a pre-textual planimetric device to make their graphic art appear more elementary, almost like a letter.

So, among these over one thousand works, we can see graphs in the form of lithographies, xylographies, screen paintings, drypoint works, or sketches and drawings in pencil, pastel or quill, and also in gouache, watercolour, acryl or ink. Collage works are also to be found here: according to thinkers like Kevin Power, collage is the sign of the fragmentary mentality that determines the philosophy of the visual culture in the 20th and 21st centuries.

It is a true laminar treasure that we exhibit today: the simple paper notes of a journey that has just started, or the leaves and blossoms of a creeper that is constantly growing. This exhibit serves as the most carefully planned «first part» –or first chapter, or first glimpse into a cabinet of curiosities– of a possible saga with future episodes.