This catalogue focuses on a series of paintings made of discarded euro banknotes. These imposing fields of colour produced by the synthesis of the original banknotes are part of a greater investigation that seeks to remobilise devalued material. With a foreword by Jean Capeille.

“The story of the success enjoyed by pulp magazines comes down to a principle of coherence. Narratives of what are considered to be minor puzzles—science fiction episodes, police investigations, erotic pretexts—find, in pulp paper, the “inferior” material base that makes their widespread distribution possible. According to this tautological justification, the sophistication of the object refers back to the supposed sophistication of its content. The operation that Christodoulos Panayiotou executes with his Pulp Paintings represents a crack in this principle of causality. He imposes a compact, flat form on a pile of demonetised banknotes salvaged from the Banque de France, creating paper pulp from shredded money that by the end of the process will have conserved nothing of its original composition except a residual manifestation of pigment. Nothing remains of this invalidated material apart from a new colour produced by the synthesis of the original banknotes. It is said of colour that it represents the substance of the object: in this sense it is as if “money laundering” was money’s ultimate fate—that which doesn’t readily “show its colour” finally sets it up as the sole guarantee of its own reality.”