Brooklyn-based Filipino American artist Paolo Arao works in fabric, creating brightly colored, formally preoccupied compositions. He selects cloth remnants and carefully stitches them together into precise geometric arrangements. These arrangements are then stretched over frames, much in the way that canvas is stretched over a frame to create a painting. Paolo Arao: In Dialog with Drawing at the Columbus Museum joins thirteen of Arao’s personal works with the artist’s own selections from the museum’s permanent collection. For Arao, the intimate nature of his material is a way to employ formal abstraction without the coldness or distance of minimal work.
Though the process of sewing and assembling is akin to quilting, Arao refers to his works as paintings, which is exactly how they function. In his artist statement he writes, “While my paintings may appear directly related to abstract and geometric drawings, they are also distant cousins of—and equally connected to—portraits and landscapes.” Some of the fabrics are acquired from commercial sources in the Philippines, some are his or his husband’s recycled clothing, and a few are studio drop cloths. The occasional paint stains on his drop cloth remnants are transformed into expressionist marks through the stitching and stretching process.
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