What is drawing today, in an era saturated with fast and immaterial images? How can graphic representation preserve its linguistic autonomy in a visual context dominated by digital spectacularization? These questions emerge while walking through the halls of Palazzo Paltroni, home of Fondazione del Monte di Bologna, where the exhibition “Wallbook” by Paul Cox (Paris, 1959) is currently on display. A self-taught artist born to musicians of Belgian and Dutch origin, Cox has developed, alongside his primary activity of a painting that borders on drawing, a distinguished career creating children’s books, theater and opera posters, scenography and playful installations, advertising campaigns and games.
Paul Cox, “Wallbook”, installation view at Fondazione del Monte di Bologna e Ravenna, ph. Un Cinquantesimo | Fabio Celot / @fabio.celot, courtesy Fondazione del Monte di Bologna e Ravenna
The setup at Palazzo Paltroni abolishes the architectural boundaries of the exhibition rooms: the walls disappear behind a continuous painting on an environmental scale, 75 meters long, conceived as a juxtaposition of modular units forming a single large visual apparatus. The abolition of distinction between individual works in favor of their continuity offers visitors an experience beyond traditional pictorial fruition, projecting them into a sort of kaleidoscopic visual vertigo. The canvases, painted over four months in the artist’s studio in Burgundy, unfold to form a panoramic graphic continuum characterized by vivid and essential colors. The enveloping effect of this device recalls, in a more playful sense, the environmental engagement strategies developed by artists like Daniel Buren or Sol LeWitt, while taking a more narrative and openly figurative path. Cox’s stylistic signature articulates through an ostentatiously elementary visual vocabulary: stylized drawings with simplified yet incisive lines populate the pictorial plane (which here coincides with the wall’s extension), organized on a red rectangular grid that serves as the supporting structure for the figurative layout. This modular framework becomes the playground for products of an imagination oscillating between childlike reminiscences and coded references to art history. The depicted characters and objects reveal a careful study of proportions and chromatic balances, with a prevalence of saturated and bright colors typical of the artist’s palette, which amplifies the playful character of the ensemble.
Paul Cox, “Wallbook”, installation view at Fondazione del Monte di Bologna e Ravenna, ph. Un Cinquantesimo | Fabio Celot / @fabio.celot, courtesy Fondazione del Monte di Bologna e Ravenna
The brushstrokes intersect, repeating the reticular structure of the background grid in a thickened and closer version, creating an additional geometric level cleverly contradicted by the naive character of the portrayed figures, which move with lightness in the pictorial space, giving an almost musical rhythm to the whole. Each of the elementary painted presences, mostly human figures, domestic animals and everyday objects, is surrounded by a specific chromatic aura that constitutes its background and setting, evocative of naive rural landscapes or domestic interiors. The formal simplification carried out by the artist recalls examples of folk art, with homages to his most beloved masters, such as Töpffer, Hokusai, Brueghel and Chardin. An interesting aspect of Cox’s visual grammar is the absence of recognizable faces in the characters, an element that introduces a subtle disquiet in an apparently harmonious universe. This obliteration of identity gives the figures an archetypal dimension, transforming them into generic silhouettes that populate a world that appears perfect but is trapped within itself. The effect is that of an ambiguous utopia between innocence and dystopia, between nostalgia for a primordial Eden and the compulsion to repeat.
Paul Cox, “Wallbook”, installation view at Fondazione del Monte di Bologna e Ravenna, ph. Un Cinquantesimo | Fabio Celot / @fabio.celot, courtesy Fondazione del Monte di Bologna e Ravenna
The immersion generated by the arrangement of the canvases also produces the sensation of being inside a three-dimensional illustrated book and inhabiting its drawing. Have we shrunk or have the illustrations of the fairy tale grown to tower over us? For Paul Cox, the figures and narratives that populate literature constitute a world that exits books and can become real. This performative aspect represents one of the artist’s strengths, which risks, precisely because of its immediate effectiveness, tipping over into a predominantly scenographic dimension that flattens the possibilities for a more articulated reflection on the specific pictorial elements. In this liminal dimension between representation and environment, Cox transforms the spectator from passive observer to active participant in the visual narrative. “Wallbook” thus configures itself as a metacritical operation that questions the status of the contemporary image while reaffirming the centrality of bodily experience in the act of seeing. The exhibition also represents a moment of reflection on the possibility of preserving a territory of expressive autonomy for drawing in an era dominated by the digitalization of images. Cox’s response passes through the claim of the materiality of the sign, of its physical presence in space, of its ability to generate an experience irreducible to screen-mediated fruition. His visual device, in its apparent simplicity, manages to raise complex questions about the future of graphic representation and its possibilities of resistance to digital homologation. “Wallbook” thus becomes a poetic manifesto on the persistence of drawing as a primary language of human expression, capable of creating alternative worlds precisely while questioning their boundaries.
Info:
Paul Cox. Wallbook
2/04/2025 – 11/05/2025
Fondazione del Monte di Bologna e Ravenna
Via delle Donzelle, 2 –Bologna
https://fondazionedelmonte.it/
Actor and performer, he loves visual arts in all their manifestations.
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