Carta e cartone

Paper runs as a thread across Paul's entire practice. In the early 1970s he wraps cardboard structures in newspaper, producing works that look like artefacts dug out of a recently abandoned building. Decades later, in the 2000s, he returns to paper — but now pressed into rigid models, sealed inside glass-and-wood cases like archaeological finds.

The teca works (model in case) are among the most architectural of all his sculptures: they read as scale studies of buildings that were never built, or perhaps were demolished and reduced to a pressed cardboard memory.

What ties the early newspaper works to the late teche is a simple thought: that paper, the most fragile of materials, is also the one most willing to remember.