SELECTED WORKS

Artist Statement

" I aim to engage with the world with wide-open senses. My work is about the magic moments of life as well as its inconveniences. I want to take pictures, while forgetting about the process of photography, until I’m saturated with an existential sense of life. Every step I take begins with the notion of ‘mono no aware’: the transience of everything, the gentle melancholy of things, being sensitive to ephemera"

Paul Cupido

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The notion of Mu transcends yes or no. In translation, its meaning comes close to ‘does not have’. Searching for Mu—taking shape in photographs, film clips, sound, and folded paper—is tantamount to a quest. I have journeyed nearly as far from home as possible. Nevertheless, a journey outward equally means an exploration of our inner selves—an inward journey seeking acceptance that life comes to an end, yet at the same time knowing that life is circular, continually beginning anew.

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Synopsis

The photographic work of Paul Cupido (b. 1972, Terschelling, the Netherlands) revolves around the principle of mu: a philosophical concept that could be translated as ‘does not have’, but is equally open to countless interpretations. Mu can be considered a void, albeit one that holds potential. 

Cupido’s ongoing photographic and cinematic experiment ‘Searching for Mu’ is at once a personal and universal odyssey of our fleeting existence in relation to the profound emotional experiences of love, time, and death. Instead of presuming to be documents, his photographs point to transcendent reflections of the soul and of the intermingling of the microscopic and macroscopic.