This catalogue focuses on a series of paintings made of discarded euro banknotes. These imposing fields of colour produced by the synthesis of the original banknotes are part of a greater investigation that seeks to remobilise devalued material. With a foreword by Jean Capeille.
“The story of the success enjoyed by pulp magazines comes down to a principle of coherence. Narratives of what are considered to be minor puzzles—science fiction episodes, police investigations, erotic pretexts—find, in pulp paper, the "inferior" material base that makes their widespread distribution possible. According to this tautological justification, the sophistication of the object refers back to the supposed sophistication of its content. The operation that Christodoulos Panayiotou executes with his Pulp Paintings represents a crack in this principle of causality. He imposes a compact, flat form on a pile of demonetised banknotes salvaged from the Banque de France, creating paper pulp from shredded money that by the end of the process will have conserved nothing of its original composition except a residual manifestation of pigment. Nothing remains of this invalidated material apart from a new colour produced by the synthesis of the original banknotes. It is said of colour that it represents the substance of the object: in this sense it is as if "money laundering" was money's ultimate fate—that which doesn't readily "show its colour" finally sets it up as the sole guarantee of its own reality.”
Jean Capeille
Published on the occasion of the artist's exhibition at galerie Kamel Mennour, Paris, from October 15 to November 24, 2018.
Christodoulos Panayiotou's (born 1978 in Limassol, Cyprus) wide-ranging research focuses on the identification and uncovering of hidden narratives in the visual records of history and time.
Solo exhibitions of his work have been held (amongst others) at the 56th Venice Biennial, The Cyprus Pavilion; Camden Arts Centre, London; Musée d'Orsay, Paris; Casa Luis Barragán, Mexico City; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Kunsthalle Zürich; Casino Luxembourg; CCA Kitakyushu; Museum of Contemporary Art, St. Louis; Museum of Contemporary Art, Leipzig; Centre d'Art Contemporain de Brétigny; and at Point Center of Contemporary Art, Nicosia. In 2019 he collaborated on the conception of the Emma Kunz - Visionary Drawings exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery. His work was also shown in a number of group exhibitions including: the 8th Melle Biennale; the 14th Lyon Biennial; the 13th Sharjah Biennial; dOCUMENTA (13), Kassel; 8th Berlin Biennale; 7th Liverpool Biennial; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Museion, Bolzano; Migros Museum, Zürich; CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, San Francisco; Joan Miro Foundation, Barcelona; Witte de With, Rotterdam; Bonniers Konsthall, Stockholm; Philadelphia Museum of Art; Ashkal Alwan Center for Contemporary Arts, Beirut; Artist Space, New York; MoCA Miami.
