Additional Images

Provenance:

Courtesy of the artist.

The Work & Artist Bio

The bi-lateral symmetry of Paul Robles’s Sanguine - Little Bones, 2023, gives an heraldic weight and certitude to this work. Knife-cut origami paper in the beautiful, but also cautioning carmine red of blood, this work is characteristic of Robles’s endlessly varying paper cut pieces. At a substantial 21 by 21 inches, it is confrontational and seductive. Born in the Philippines, Paul Robles calls, for sources, on animistic familiars, folklore, trauma, issue of sexuality, and grief. The papers Robles uses are solid colours, the gradations in the image coming from the negative white spaces around the images which, alternately, can be read as a positive form. Sanguine can mean optimistic; it also refers to the colour of blood. This stunning complex work is rich in its presentation of these mixed possibilities.

Paul Robles is a Canadian artist based in Winnipeg, Canada, on Treaty 1 Territory. Robles holds a BFA from the University of Manitoba School of Art and Bachelor of Arts degree in Sociology from The University of Winnipeg. He has exhibited widely in Canada, USA, and France. His work was the subject of the exhibition “Tracing Paths” at C2-Centre for Craft, Winnipeg (2019), and was included in the group exhibition “A Pea Can Be Chopped Up and Reassembled Into The Sun” at the Regina Art Gallery (2021). In 2023 his work was included in “The Undead Archive: 100 Years of Photographic Ghosts,” an exhibition shown across Gallery 1C03, the University of Manitoba Archives & Special Collections and the University of Manitoba School of Art Gallery, Winnipeg. A review of the exhibition was published in Border Crossings, where a Portfolio of his work was also featured in 2007. Robles has produced an outdoor installation for Nuit Blanche (Winnipeg & Waterloo, ON) and installed in the Wall-to-Wall Mural Festival in 2021. He has participated in Plug In ICA’s Summer Institute Residence Program, and Papier Art Fair, Montreal. In January 2024 he was the artist in residence at aabijijiwan New Media Lab.

The Undead Archive: 100 Years of Photographing Ghosts, Border Crossings Issue 163, 2024

"A Pea Can Be Chopped Up and Reassembled Into the Sun", Border Crossings Issue 158, 2022

Paper Wait: Paul Robles, Border Crossings Issue 107, 2008