18画廊有幸举办意大利年轻艺术家Laurina Paperina在中国首次个人展。在欧洲她的作品广受欢迎，这次终于能在中国展出。作品中，Laurina Paperina表现出她的睿智， 独特且与生俱来的幽默感。凭借自身特长幽默性与敏感性，她给讽刺主人公赋予生命，譬如超级英雄；快乐形象譬如宇宙青蛙。主题看似简单，意义却强而有力。她创新了一种新的语言，即新一代的视觉语言。正如她所阐述：这些主人公都是“我们年轻时所喜爱的英雄（...）不知怎的，它们微微发福，并且无情的白发悄悄爬上了额头。
Paperina作品中的人物犹如致命般的病毒渗透到整个漫画世界。同时，他们又是友善的。她补充道：“我创造了真正的“茶余饭后的漫画人物--超级英雄。她是在玩弄虚构小说，营造强烈讽刺，有时她过于把那些幼稚的人物形象看得太重。
 
在她的图画中，洋泾浜的英语词组常会出现。更正或是划掉这些词会使其更符合面向国际公众，闻名遐迩的动画主角公名字的变更（如Plastic Man橡胶人就变成了痉挛人 SpasticMan）。Paperina轻松的心态使她能公开表示：虽是非常熟悉的文化现实，但仍然存在着交流上的困难。

多年来，超级英雄必须面对“超级问题”，它体现了后现代社会的主要担忧。在这方面，现成的就有Duchamp，这是著名流行音乐大师的作品（如Warhol）。首先，Lichtenstein和Haring、Basquiat的绘画作品中混乱且信息超载的宇宙，后现代社会能在其作品中清晰可见。

如同写一条文字信息，Laurina Paperina作品反映出一种新的交流手段，简短，但强而有力，且始终能切入重点。

Laurina Paperina 虽年轻，但在很多城市举办过展览如巴黎，马德里，维也纳，斯德哥尔摩，罗马，那不勒斯，帕多瓦，旧金山，纽约，洛杉矶，开普敦，东京，并且在世界各著名机构举办过画展，如Fondazione Cà La Ghironda (意大利) ; Hunterdon Museum of Art (美国); Fondazione Bartoli-Felter (意大利); Castel Sant’Elmo, (意大利); Centro d’Arte Contemporanea Cavalese (意大利); Centro Internazionale per l’Arte Contemporanea, castello Colonna di Genazzano (意大利); Galleria Comunale d’Arte Contemporanea (意大利); Fondazione Janco Dada Museum (以色列); John Michael Kohler Arts Center in Sheboygan, WI, (美国); Museo Madre, Napoli (意大利).

艺术家的陈述

“我玩艺术，我的任务是对一个现代元素进行讽刺地阐述。这是一个综合的阐述，以语言组成的多样性和相互交错的矛盾性；涵盖网络文化，电视，漫画，视频游戏的影响，科幻和漫画正创造着一种元素。虽转化成明显的混乱形态，但始终是已自身可识别的形式显现。
 
主人公错位使作品更显“画的讽刺”：他们都是我幻想的成果，充满活力的造型和虚拟现实的艳丽色彩。虚拟现实类似于视频游戏，虚构和外观的相互作用且模拟现实。

总之，我的任务是对我个人经验的讽刺游戏。没有具体目的，但体现出思维的分歧，而且分歧可以与其共存这种方式，就好像一个拼图必不可少的组成部分。”

18Gallery is proud to host young Italian artist Laurina Paperina’s first solo show in China. As the newest big hit in Europe, it is time her work is finally shown in China. Laurina Paperina has demonstrated her sense of wit, and her unique and much needed sense of humour. Laurina Paperina uses the tools of her generation - humour and immediacy. Her animations gives life to ironic protagonists such as superheroes, and enjoyable characters like space frogs. They are simple subjects but extremely powerful.  Symbolically, she creates a new language; the visual language of the next generation. As she herself puts it, it's all about “The heroes that we loved when we were young (…) somewhat fatter and with some white hairs relentlessly appearing here and there.”

Paperina's characters penetrate the world of comics like a virus – lethally. Yet at the same time, they are friendly. These are not all, she adds, invented "knock-off" superheroes of genuine comic book characters. She is playing  with fiction within fiction, and creating a strongly ironic and sometimes childish character to a genre that has often taken itself too seriously.

In her drawings phrases appear in Pidgin English, corrections and crossed out words make the texts suitable for an international public, distorting names of famous heroes (Plastic Man becomes Spastic Man, for example). Paperina's light-heartedness allows her to openly express the difficulty in communicating a cultural reality which is certainly already familiar.

Over the years, superheroes have had to face "super-problems", most which represent the principal fears of post-modern society. In this regard, the ready made of Duchamp, the famous works masters of pop such as Warhol and, above all, Lichtenstein, and the chaotic and information-overloaded universe represented in the paintings of Haring and Basquiat, post-modern society looks inside itself.

Just like writing a text message, Laurina Paperina’s work is a reflection of new means of communication, short yet striking, and always getting straight to the point.

Despite her young age, Laurina Paperina has shown in Paris, Madrid, Wien, Stockholm, Roma, Napoli, Padova, San Francisco, New York City, Los Angeles, Cape Town, Tokyo, and more, and in major institutions around the world: Fondazione Cà La Ghironda (IT) ; Hunterdon Museum of Art (USA); Fondazione Bartoli-Felter (IT); Castel Sant’Elmo, (IT); Centro d’Arte Contemporanea Cavalese (IT); Centro Internazionale per l’Arte Contemporanea, castello Colonna di Genazzano (IT); Galleria Comunale d’Arte Contemporanea (IT); Fondazione
Janco Dada Museum (Israel); John Michael Kohler Arts Center in Sheboygan, WI, (USA);
Museo Madre, Napoli (IT).

Artist’s Statement

“I play with art. My work is an ironic elaboration of contemporaneity and the elements which are part of it. It is an elaboration stemming from a language synthesis where diversity and contradiction are intertwined and where the influence of internet culture, TV, comic strips, video games, sci-fi and cartoons are generating a complex set of elements, which, although turning into an apparent chaos, are letting themselves be seen in recognizable forms.

Characters populating my works are "painted irony": they are the fruits of my fantasy, dynamic forms and flamboyant colors of some sort of virtual reality resembling a video game where fiction and appearance interplay and simulate reality.

In sum, my work is an ironic game on my experiences, which has no specific purpose but to represent divergences of thought and the way such divergences may coexist, as though each element were an indispensable fragment of a jigsaw-puzzle.”