Ingénue

Paul Cupido (1972) graduated with honors from the Fotoacademie Amsterdam in 2017. He since published a handful of books, including the artist’s publications Searching for Mu (2017), Continuum (2019) and 4 a.m. (2021) in collaboration with graphic designer Akiko Wakabayashi. Cupido’s work has been exhibited widely internationally, among others at Paris Photo, Unseen, and Nordic Light Festival. In 2017 he won the Hariban Jury Award. Cupido is represented by Bildhalle Gallery (Zurich & Amsterdam) and Danziger Gallery (New York City).

The photographic work of Paul Cupido 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, Cupido’s photographs point to transcendent reflections of the soul and of the intermingling of the microscopic and macroscopic.

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