Taking a look at education and the repetition it involves, living with everyday images, to death lurking, love and all its translations, for more than twenty years, Paulo Licona has built an artistic practice as an observatory of life, expressed in relational art processes, educational processes, installation, screen printing, and paper assemblages in the form of piñatas.

Soltar la presa ¡Auu!, Paulo Licona’s first exhibition at La Balsa Arte, consists of a large wallpaper-piñata, a house without a floor or roof, and some clocks without hours, which flow between images of time, fire, air, and water, making some references to Colombian art history.

These pieces gathered in the Medellin Sala de Proyectos are unique, as his piñata assemblages are usually made from treated tissue paper and printed bond paper. However, in these pieces his work incorporates new textures that he found in the archives of La Balsa Papel in Bogota.

La Balsa Papel began almost two decades ago when Ana Patricia Gómez, founder and director of the gallery, received a container belonging to a paper export company that was in a recycling plant in Baltimore, about to be destroyed. When the container arrived in Bogota, they realized that it contained handmade paper and special paper for printmaking, drawing, watercolor, and ink from Japan, India, Korea, France, Italy, the United States, England, among others, which was—and still is—very difficult to access in Colombia.

So this exhibition is not only special because it is the artist's first project with La Balsa Arte, but also because it brings together two worlds in the immensity of paper.