Laurina Paperina is one of the young Italian artists with most international projection. The immediacy and visual simplicity of her work collide with the large doses of irony and sense of humour that has to be digested by the viewer. Such is the mockery that she even laughs at it. The scenes she portrays are usually grotesque and shameless, such as that of Andy Warhol turned into his iconic banana, Bansky’s rat willing to kill its author or Jackson Pollock's brain depicted as an explosion of colour paint. Pape is the creator of a universe of infinite parodies in which she plays constantly with the role of art nowadays.
“People say that I draw cartoons”, writes on a wall one of your characters ironically. But it cannot be denied that cartoons have influenced your style very much.
I grew up in a small village where most of the people think that to be an artist you have to paint trees, mountains or landscapes, they don’t know what is contemporary art. In their opinion, if you draw with a cartoon style you are not an artist, but only an illustrator, and of course I totally disagree. So when I wrote that phrase it was an ironical way to emphasize that way of thinking.
Which was your favourite cartoon when you were a teenager? Were you more into TV or comics?
I am proud to admit that I am the product of popular culture that absolute influenced my art. When I was a child I grew up with television, cartoons and comic strips. My favorite cartoons were the Japanese anime television series as Saint Seiya (Knights of the Zodiac), Candy Candy and Fantazoo (the title in english should be Ox Tales). Instead, when I was a young girl my favourite cartoons were South Park and Futurama, I really liked The Itchy and Scratchy Show by Matt Groaning.
When did you find your drawing style? Was it already at university?
I’ve always drawn and I found my drawing style day by day. At the Academic of Fine Art, I already found my personal drawing style, of course raw and dirtier than it is now.
In How to kill the artists, paradoxically, you invent personalized ways to kill artists that you admire, and you introduce yourself in the series as well. Even if it's bloody, is it an homage to them?
In my video works How to kill the artists, there is an encyclopaedia of the possible deaths of artists at the hands of their own practices or artworks. I exact my revenge on the art world; I take the art stars off their pedestals and remind us they are human. I choose artists who are at the top of the popular charts, so that sooner or later, for better or worse, I would be the only artist left alive on the earth. These include Kiki Smith, Banksy, Yoshitomo Nara, Christo, Marcel Duchamp, Francis Bacon, David Hockney, Jackson Pollock, Douglas Gordon...
In my video works How to kill the artists, there is an encyclopaedia of the possible deaths of artists at the hands of their own practices or artworks. I exact my revenge on the art world; I take the art stars off their pedestals and remind us they are human. I choose artists who are at the top of the popular charts, so that sooner or later, for better or worse, I would be the only artist left alive on the earth. These include Kiki Smith, Banksy, Yoshitomo Nara, Christo, Marcel Duchamp, Francis Bacon, David Hockney, Jackson Pollock, Douglas Gordon...
Working with other artists or creative people is always fun for me; teamwork has more potential, a lot of power; I would say stronger than just one person. I try to take all the energy possible from these collaborations.
How do you feel when working on installations in live environment and in bigger format?
I enjoy very much when I can make site-specific installations or big murals, but in all works I make starts as a small drawing or a sketch. I made my first drawings in a small room where I could paint only small paintings because of the limited space available to me. Anyway, now I have a bigger studio where the space is multiplied so I can make big installations or large canvases, but these works take a long time, while the small works are faster and instinctive to me.
Death, blood, madness and sexuality are recurring topics in your drawings. Are these issues the ones that allow you to pronounce better your audacious criticism?
Through different media and tools of my generation – as wild sense of humor and the immediacy – I mock the icons of the art world, pop culture celebrities, contemporary heroes and even myself. I speak about real things even if they seem to be lies, truths made out of lies with images that we know. My language is a pure game; the recreational dimension totally melts with the images, leaving out the research of a final moral, allowing the public to lapse into sounds, gags, shapes. So my works are like a mash-up of all of my passions in life, from the Internet culture, movies, nature, food, video games and comics.
There are sharp messages behind your artworks. What do you think about censorship? Where are their limits?
Art is free expression and a way for the artists to express their feelings and point of view. Censorship of the arts is restricting and putting us in chains.
“Art is dead” is your slogan. Do you mean that the traditional way to understand and appreciate art is dead? Because your ‘art’ has been exposed.
“Art is dead” is a reference to my series How to kill the artists, where I am the ‘virtual’ serial killer of the contemporary art. I use this phrase to ironize dramatically about the role of art today, especially in these turbulent times around us. It’s a joke. I play with art.
