Shaped Combi #02 2008

Curator: Pedro Calapez’s "Shaped Combi #02," created in 2008, offers an intriguing dialogue between painting and sculpture. It's a mixed-media piece primarily using acrylic on canvas and paper. Editor: It's immediately striking. The juxtaposition of geometric forms with those raw, torn edges, along with those vibrant, almost clashing colors, creates a real tension. Curator: Indeed. The upper canvas is dominated by expanses of bright yellow and green, seemingly contained within the geometric borders, and then disrupted, like seeing spring emerging out of a concrete construct. Colors have long-held symbolic resonance. What comes to mind for you in these choices? Editor: Yellow often symbolizes joy, intellect, or warning, while green represents growth and renewal. But the application seems almost defiant, challenging the conventional association of these colors with positive sentiments by distorting our experience and adding those aggressive color combinations on the lower panel, maybe nodding toward the fragmented nature of postmodern existence? Curator: I think there's something to that. If we view the combined shapes as palimpsests, layering time and experience, those gestures you observed invite us to contemplate the inherent impermanence of the supposed modern, the contemporary era even. The overlaid medium offers constant reformation through layering of ideas across eras. Editor: I see a critique of institutional rigidity, how fixed forms can constrict and distort natural expression or socio-political movements that push toward new paradigms. The central void within the bottom structure—that cut-out—becomes significant, a space for absence, loss, but also possibility. Curator: Right, a disruption or deconstruction of the known or familiar. Think of Carl Jung, postulating the void as the beginning from which creativity bursts into expression; how even after destruction, there’s an echo in form to guide towards new meaning. What survives carries importance from before. Editor: This reading reframes my initial interpretation. Seeing it less as an outright critique and more as a search for alternative narratives and ways of knowing. It feels like it is gesturing toward healing—albeit amidst ongoing tension and chaos. Curator: Yes, like the push and pull we all experience between what came before and our need to reconstruct a narrative moving forward, right? Editor: Absolutely. The vibrant yet uneasy combinations evoke a very contemporary sense of urgency, demanding we engage with our world’s complexities head-on. Curator: It encourages the contemplation of not just what is said but what echoes on after it has been uttered.