Kaoli Mashio

An overlay of materials and their associated gestures compose Kaoli Mashio’s Panorama I-IV: pigments solidified on the paper plane, linoleum paint for a metallic taste, pencil and its intimate precision, a collage of shapes from which we follow the cutting lines made with care. Our perception builds up with this set of gestures, roaming the landscape in a careful search. The strokes that make up those shapes and lines have a tendency to create forms that fit their neighbors, anchoring them in the picture plane with a sense of organic complicity. They join with the materials that merge and fix themselves on the steady ground, giving the entropic quality a sense of solidity. However, at times the shapes almost touch, or hover lightly over each other, bringing in the risk of collision.

In Panorama IV, the paper applied as a last layer is a neater cut in the orderly organization of the system, one step further in a continuous state of coalescence. Their internal activity loads up concentrated picture planes that vary one from the other, multiplying each time the acts that they store, accumulating the panoramas and the repeated acts of seeing. That’s maybe why they seem to produce this stasis that looks like white noise, like on old television sets when the signal doesn’t come through with enough clarity. Their density contrasts with their lightness, which puts doubts on the directionality of the gaze; introspection, or external reality? If it is a panorama, what kind of landscape is it? Micro- or macroscopic? Or maybe just in-between those two poles, a limbo state made of movements without endpoints? Stretched between the atomic cell and the cosmological world, between the universally mundane of the industrially produced material and individuality’s singularity, they reconfigure the experience to better store it, lodging acts of seeing in the repeated convergence of lines, superpositions of shapes, and cutting gestures that leave place for gaps or blanks, like a sudden perceptual jamming.

– Paolo Baggi