Wood is a material that cuts across cultures and generations all over the world. It’s used for so many purposes that one article could never be enough to cover everything, but here we’ll focus on wood art through the perspective of the Australian artist Paul Kaptein.

Kaptein’s carved wooden pieces could be described as surreal, timeless and disruptive. This way of contouring his figures, often resembling human bodies or limbs, has become his trademark and his way of disconnecting from the immediacy of the digital age.

The artist often uses Jelutong wood for his works, a species of tree common in Southeast Asia, especially in Malaysia. With a pale yellow hue, this wood is ideal for manual work, unlike other harder and more common woods. On the other hand, it stands out for its stability, straight grain and fine texture.

 

 

To craft his sculptures, the artist acquires 5-centimeter-thick sheets of glued laminated timber, which he then joins together until they reach an ideal size to begin the sculptural work. During the process of shaping the piece, Kaptein primarily uses hand chisels and finishes by applying a coat of sandpaper to achieve a rough texture.

Immersed in the process, Kaptein creates distorted figures that highlight the sense of space and emptiness. His wood art has the ability to transport the viewer like a portal to infinity. With forms that resemble human bodies and limbs, Kaptein achieves an effect of perpetual motion in his sculptures, incorporating the imperfections and details of the wood as he chisels and plays with his designs. 

In the words of Paul Kaptein: “Glitches are a disruption to continuity that become little spaces, portals through time. They can loop back and project forward simultaneously. I’m suggesting the body exists within these temporal paradoxes, or parallaxes, constantly unfurling across differing temporal trajectories”.

 

 

The way the artist works with the material converges with his vision of wood in space-time. His entry into the world of wood art emerges as a break from the exhausting hyper-connected, accelerated and ephemeral lifestyle, contrasting with his way of seeing wood as a universal resource with a historical significance or a record of a previous life, representing the past, present and future.

Craftsmanship with wood implies a process that, in the artist's words, "refuses to be fast and immediate. It is slow." This particularity, according to Kaptein, is essential to obtaining a good result. In this way, the Australian manages to distance himself from contemporary banalities such as fleeting and instant gratification, and to achieve a sensation of being stopped in time, throughout the process.

The artist's gaze is reflected in his work as a proposal that invites the viewer to take a pause to contemplate and appreciate their time. In summary, wood, as a resource, reveals its versatility from various often-overlooked perspectives, similar to how Kaptein's appreciation introduces us to new viewpoints.

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