SmartShanghai | Laurina Paperina @ Bund18

Laurina Paperina @ Bund18

By T.E. Revells, Aug 3rd, 2010 | In Art

Italian artist Laurina Paperina offers, in her effacing solo show, digital art, photography, installations, sculptures, portraiture, and an animated short film. A giant inflatable head is the largest work on display; it's basically a cross between a beach ball and a toy you've seen in a gumball machine. Opposite this behemoth, bipedal eyeballs wage intergalactic war amidst UFOs and reptiles.

But it's a series of small tile portraits displayed along the entrance hall that best encapsulates the mood of Paperina's work. Near a scheming Osama bin Laden, you can find Bender from Futurama, and Cindy Sherman smiles next to a very menacing Donnie Darko bunny. The wildly colorful blocks are uniform in shape and displayed one after the other a finger's width apart. As if a spool of film was unwound and stapled to a wall, they form a long thin band along the length of 18Gallery's hall. The effect is analogous to flipping channels: characters from prime-time news coexist with celebrities, cartoons, rock stars, and ad images for everything under the sun.

What makes Paperina's little portraits so enjoyable is that they make such juxtaposition a little less disorienting, and a little less commercially charged. Her style flattens the contextual differences between people, robots, mice, whatever. She offers a comic book world in which terrorists and cartoons alike are granted a few inches of space and sometimes, a word balloon. Nothing more.

This is more than escapism. Paperina describes her subjects as "The heroes that we loved when we were young...somewhat fatter and with some white hairs relentlessly appearing here and there." There are certainly lumps and bumps on some of her subjects, but I think she refers here to more than age. Despite, or perhaps because of, the ubiquity of its image, timelessness is an inextricable part of the nexus of values that constitutes an icon. An icon doesn't really change. Marilyn Monroe can only ever be a blond; otherwise she's Norma Jeane.

There's something inhuman about this impermeability; our icons are not like us. The advertising industry like many others makes use of this fact. But by relocating our icons, Paperina makes them more accessible to us. In Paperina's work, the icon is changed. Discolored, dislocated, seedier, weirder, in her world it no longer communicates the same style or value that it does in the world at large.

That process continues in works throughout the gallery. Is Ozzy Osbourne a musician or a B list celebrity? It doesn't really matter, he's here in signature glasses and Paperina's saturated colors. Batman and Robin drive around town drunk. Removed from the reality in which they exist, icons no longer have a monopoly on fame, virtue, happiness, beauty or the countless other desirable qualities that our culture grants them.

A short film at the front of the exhibit offers several ways to kill Laurina Paperina (dog, snot, meteor...). Like Kenny from South Park, she suffers a comically gory death, then reappears to await yet another improbable end. Elsewhere, we find her head on Nike of Samothrace, and an impish "urban portrait" slyly painted over a photo of a graffitied alley. By appearing alongside the icons of culture, these self-portraits do play on her status as an artist and budding star. But they also invite us to play alongside her, and remind us that her work offers us a world of images that we are perhaps conditioned to recognize, but free to value as we wish.

Laurina Paperina's solo show runs until September 12 at 18Gallery, on the fourth floor of Bund 18. As this gallery stays open later than most, it's a good spot to cool off from a nighttime stroll and take in something beside the Pudong skyline.