"Untitled" and "Vibrations"

Mall Paris is known for her abstract minimalist paintings. The works painted here on corrugated cardboard shipping boxes also call to mind arte povera. In Paris’s practice, it is essential that the source of her images – organised into patterns and series – always lies in life itself. While these works are not figurative and contain no words, they are nevertheless grounded in what has been seen and convey to us a fragment of the artist’s lived experience.

When looking more closely at paintings that seem to submit to strict order, one can notice faint pencil lines drawn in advance. With further attention, we can also see flickers in the contours of colour patches and delicate irregularities in the translucence of the paint layers. These are not mistakes. They are not even human errors, for a human being is not a robot but a breathing, swaying, feeling living being. These are the qualities that bring Paris’s paintings to life. The subtle encounters between calculated order and deeply felt action are what give her works their often-noted delicacy, refinement, and fragility.

In music, it is possible to compose countless combinations from notes, but only a fraction of them are pleasing to the human ear. In principle, each of Paris’s series of forms could likewise be continued endlessly, but the artist herself says that at a certain point the quality declines and the feeling is no longer right. It is as if the thing that needed to be done has been accomplished. For a brief moment, something extraordinary flashes between order and disorder. Recognising and capturing that moment is true art.