Taking a look at education and the repetition it involves, living with everyday images, to death lurking, love and all its translations, for more than twenty years, Paulo Licona has built an artistic practice as an observatory of life, expressed in relational art processes, educational processes, installation, screen printing, and paper assemblages in the form of piñatas.

‘Soltar la presa ¡AUU!’, Paulo Licona’s first exhibition at La Balsa Arte, consists of a large wallpaper-piñata, a house without a floor or roof, and some clocks without hours, which flow between images of time, fire, air, and water, making some references to Colombian art history.

These pieces gathered in the Medellin Sala de Proyectos are unique, as his piñata assemblages are usually made from treated tissue paper and printed bond paper. However, in these pieces his work incorporates new textures that he found in the archives of La Balsa Papel in Bogota.

La Balsa Papel began almost two decades ago when Ana Patricia Gómez, founder and director of the gallery, received a container belonging to a paper export company that was in a recycling plant in Baltimore, about to be destroyed. When the container arrived in Bogota, they realized that it contained handmade paper and special paper for printmaking, drawing, watercolor, and ink from Japan, India, Korea, France, Italy, the United States, England, among others, which was—and still is—very difficult to access in Colombia.

So this exhibition is not only special because it is the artist's first project with La Balsa Arte, but also because it brings together two worlds in the immensity of paper.

Time. Fire. Air. Water.

Presa (dam) [*]

refers to the reservoir that overflows during the rainy season, or the upstream current that feeds its still waters. When this presa is released, its floodgates open, letting out what is no longer needed. The still water swirls for once, changing the flow downstream. The horses and cows grazing in nearby pastures, to cross what is normally a bed of river stones, barely swim with their heads above water. Then the presa is not released, but what was already loose appears elsewhere, grouped in a different order than the original—if the origin has an order.

So it is with memory, images of everything we have ever seen are stirred up. We invent thousands of techniques and devices to keep our memories in order. What would happen if we let them loose?

Presa (prey) also refers to the victim of the hunt, which, once released, escapes death if it is not badly wounded. As it is freed, it leaves marks of its escape, with traces of fur and swift footprints. The hunter gives up his dinner, but also his struggle. He relaxes his muscles and takes a nap. Insisting can force him to chase his tail and end up with a straw tail in his mouth. Why not, then, cut off the snakes' heads so they don't bite their last vertebra?

The hunter wakes up lightweight, without the heaviness of meat in his stomach. The prey dawns free, from the flood or from death. After the turmoil, little matters much. Whichever side it is, with the clarity of someone who has nothing to lose, he sets about tracing the visions that come after the commotion. He gathers everything that passed through a house, through a life, through his memory.

When the ceiling and floor collapse, and the clocks urge on until they wither, all that remains, amid so many whirlwinds, is to light a match with the optimism of lighting the sun, longing for a fire that purifies from top to bottom.

In any case, letting go of the dam speaks of something turbulent, of a crucial moment, of an edge. Taking advantage of a flux before order.

Andrea Domínguez Ramírez

[*]In Spanish, presa means both dam and prey