PAPERS

Papers, Henry Curchod’s book of drawings and works on paper, could be seen as the artist’s personal index of what a contemporary mythology of symbols and materials might look like. Gathering 162 works rich in expressiveness and variation, typology and narrative, the book is first and foremost an assemblage of themes, subjects, and styles that inform the artist’s constantly evolving way of thinking. As such, Papers mirrors Curchod´s overall painting practice, which exists in the fluid area between abstraction and figuration, as well as between his Eastern and Western upbringing: rather than constructing thematic tropes, the works in the book thrive in polarities, always refusing a dominant identity.

“Making a painting is to translate the humility of a drawing onto a canvas,” says Curchod via John Douglas Millar’s commissioned essay accompanying Papers. And indeed, both drawing and painting are not practices about something specific so much as records of the constant becomings of matters and ideas. Curchod is telling us that the work should be allowed a certain opacity, and that a demand for full legibility is, in this sense, a kind of violence.

Originating from this mindset, the book echoes mythical pasts by relating them to the material present and the artist’s constant struggle with matter. Curchod's motifs—art historical, personal, mythical, absurdist—serve as holding points against our contemporary feeling of utter disintegration, while the human remains the work’s main subject.

Again, from Douglas Millar’s essay: “What I really want to talk about though is how present they [i.e. the drawings] feel, and how attuned they are to this present, this absurd, deadened, sometimes violently beautiful present that we share as bodies and consciousnesses in this space and time.”

Ultimately, Papers is a book that feels like a profoundly generous response to the ruin of our everyday, an ode to the imagination as an engine of survival.