Close to Home, Beyond Language: Papou’s Visual Glossolalia

Feature image: Installation shot of Papou's work on exhibit at NSU Art Museum, Close to Home. Courtesy of NSU Art Museum.

At NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale, a multigenerational exhibition considers how intimacy, community, ancestry, and creative collaboration shape contemporary art in South Florida. Within that larger conversation, Papou transforms her body into a spiritual conduit: her paintings are not simply images of an interior world but physical evidence of having entered and returned from it.

On view from June 7 through October 4, 2026, Close to Home brings together 20 artists whose work emerges from the private worlds and emotional relationships that define them. Curated by Bonnie Clearwater, NSU Art Museum's director and chief curator; Ariella Wolens, Bryant-Taylor curator; and Sinaí Rivera, guest curator, the exhibition considers how romantic partners, chosen families, relatives, collaborators, ancestors, and loved ones who have died become catalysts for meaningful creative expression.

Close to Home approaches South Florida as a culturally convergent territory rather than a collection of isolated art scenes. Its participating artists represent different generations, communities, histories, and geographic relationships to the region. Some were born here. Others arrived from elsewhere. Several live in Miami, others in Broward County or Fort Lauderdale, and some have moved away while maintaining formative connections to South Florida. 

Roscoè B. Thické III memorializes his deceased grandmother through the diamond-shaped security grilles associated with her Miami home. In Redeemer, Thické's son stands in the Everglades with his arms extended in a cruciform pose. The diamond grille divides and frames his body while small cymbals placed beneath the structure transform the work into a monumental tambourine. Josh Aronson's The Cabin Mirror serves as an archive of his Florida Boys photographic project, placing young South Floridians within pastoral environments. His subjects, many from first-generation immigrant families and urban communities, are given access to familiar American rites of passage; climbing trees, swimming in springs, entering the woods, that may otherwise feel culturally or economically unavailable. Richard Moreno approaches intimacy through ritual, sound, mortality, and the gothic aesthetics of South Florida's punk and metal communities. His coffin-like reliquary containing a mummified iguana recovered from the grounds of Vizcaya exists somewhere between remains, instrument, devotional container, and esoteric sculpture. Susan Kim Alvarez's expansive Mouth of Miami turns South Florida into a Bosch-like theater of beauty, density, and chaos. Zoe Schweiger captures the psychological heat and social intimacy of Miami nightlife. Piero Penizzotto's Kings of Comedy (Chris, Imani, Bernard, Calvin, Dre) transforms a group of friends into a papier-mâché sculptural assembly.

Other artists in the exhibition approach kinship through portraiture, material memory, allegory, collective identity, and the relationship between the individual and the communities that make an artistic life possible.

Within this larger constellation, Papou's work becomes especially significant. She does not simply depict intimacy. She constructs a coded world through which memories, ancestors, psychological states, animals, ordinary objects, and spiritual energies move across different dimensions of time.

Papou presents three works in Close to Home: Pools of Orange, Tropical Violence, and Pegasus Dairy. Together they operate less like three independent objects than three passages within an expanding symbolic system.

A seagull signifies presence. An alligator embodies madness. A chicken becomes the inner voice. Bananas represent abundance. Fish and lemons acknowledge Mediterranean inheritance. Pools, dolphins, guava, palm shadows, chlorine, salt, milk, and juice contain fragments of South Florida childhood. Pegasus and Poseidon open pathways into Greek mythology and ancestral memory. These images do not form a conventional narrative. They appear, disappear, mutate, and return. They carry meanings from one painting into another while accumulating new associations. Papou is not simply making images. She is building a language.

The viewer is not given a complete dictionary. We are allowed to recognize that a language exists without being granted total fluency.

This is where Papou's work enters the mystical. Mysticism does not always depend upon an organized religion or a prescribed image of the divine. It can begin with a conviction that visible things contain invisible dimensions; and that images, gestures, movements, sounds, or rituals can momentarily give those dimensions material form. A carton is never only a carton. An alligator is never only an animal. A pool is never merely water. Each object inhabits several realities simultaneously: the material world, childhood memory, ancestry, cultural identity, psychological experience, and spiritual imagination.

One framework I referenced for approaching Papou's animals can be found in Animal Myths and Metaphors in South America, the 1985 collection of anthropological essays edited by Gary Urton. The book considers how different communities use perceived relationships between humans and animals to think about identity, kinship, initiation, social structure, transformation, and the organization of the world.

For me, Urton's book also provides a method of asking more precise questions about her art.

What human condition becomes visible through Papou's alligator? What kind of awareness enters through the seagull? When the chicken operates as the inner voice, is it advising, warning, witnessing, contradicting, or simply refusing to disappear?

Papou's animals externalize parts of the human figure that would otherwise remain inaccessible. The alligator designated as madness does more than illustrate an emotional state. It gives madness a body, habitat, appetite, and form of movement. Madness can crawl, wait, submerge itself, watch from the edge of the water, and suddenly reappear. The seagull moves between land, water, and sky. As a presence, it is mobile and transitional. It may hover above the scene, enter briefly, depart, and return elsewhere. Presence is not fixed; it is watchful and migratory. The chicken as the inner voice introduces another register. Unlike the mythological Pegasus or the predatory alligator, the chicken is ordinary, domestic, social, anxious, and persistent. The inner voice may not descend as a majestic revelation. It may scratch, cluck, repeat itself, and continue speaking from the edge of consciousness.

The divination of human and animal occurs at this boundary. Papou reads the animal as a form of human knowledge. At the same time, the animal prevents the work from becoming entirely human-centered. Her figures remain entangled with a Floridian environment that watches, threatens, nourishes, and remembers alongside them.

A coded language is not always a puzzle designed to be solved. Papou's code may be intended to evoke rather than explain.

The most revealing spiritual affiliation for understanding her art may be found in the charismatic traditions of speaking in tongues. Glossolalia occurs when the worshiper produces an ecstatic form of speech not readily understood as conventional language. A metaphysical analysis identifies a structural relationship between ecstatic speech and embodied she-shaman painting. Papou's smears, fingerprints, abrasions, splashes, and scraped passages can be understood as a form of visual glossolalia. The painting speaks in marks before those marks become fully recognizable images.

During creation, the artist's hand becomes a conduit through which interior pressure becomes visible. The artist does not necessarily illustrate the spiritual experience afterward. The application of paint is itself the experience. Papou has described lighting incense, playing music, creating an energetically protected space, removing the identities she carries in ordinary life, and painting directly with her hands. She speaks of becoming undone and emerging renewed. Her description of the studio resembles a passage into and out of an altered condition.

She reaches, crouches, crawls, bends, presses, and drags. Paint passes across her hands and onto the canvas. The distinction between painter and painting temporarily collapses. The finished painting is therefore not simply a picture produced by the event. It is the remaining physical evidence of the event. The canvas becomes a relic, a record, and a kind of spiritual seismograph. The painting's importance comes from having been generated through surrender, repetition, emotional exposure, and bodily contact. The smear is evidence that the body was there. The fingerprint is evidence that mediation briefly disappeared.

The painting is the residue of transcendence.

However, to be more generalized, I feel Papou's work can be understood under a simple umbrella of sorts, as a form of aesthetic divination; a process of receiving and interpreting signs. A mark appears. The artist studies it. Another movement answers it. An accidental mixture suggests an animal, body, shoreline, or memory. The emerging painting presents information that was not fully known before the process began. The artist acts, but she also listens.

The canvas becomes both oracle and respondent.

Divination occurs through action.

Her paintings chase backward, crawl backward, and teleport backward through a cross-dimensional flow of time.

The past does not remain safely behind the present. It enters and temporarily reorganizes it.

The journey leaves physical evidence.

In Pools of Orange, 2026, a frontal smiling figure appears amid blue tear- or water-like streaks, palms, a pool-colored band, a schematic carton, an enormous hand, and handwritten language that appears to read "Pools, Pools, orange juice." The six-foot painting retains the immediacy and disproportion of childhood drawing without simply imitating a child. The hand is particularly significant. It belongs to the figure but also functions as an emblem of the artist's physical method. It reaches, grasps, remembers, and constructs. It is both the hand represented inside the painting and the hand that brought the painting into existence.

The museum's acquisition of Pools of Orange moves this personal language into a public collection. A private ritual now becomes part of South Florida's institutional memory.

In Tropical Violence, 2026, two elongated smiling figures inhabit a field of palms, water, vegetation, and ambiguous animal or plant forms. Oil, acrylic, spray paint, sand, and latex make the unstretched canvas appear exposed to weather and time. Tropical experience becomes beauty and threat, pleasure and instability, paradise and pressure. Violence may be environmental, psychological, historical, familial, or social. The figures appear less like portraits of fixed individuals than entities caught in transformation. Human bodies, animals, vegetation, and water approach one another without maintaining stable borders. The division between person and environment begins to dissolve.

Pegasus Dairy, positioned between the paintings, transfers Papou's code into three-dimensional space. An oversized milk-carton form stands on a dark-blue plinth decorated with palms, waves, a sun, and a Greek-key-like pattern. The commercial container becomes a childhood artifact, mythological monument, household shrine, and impossible archaeological discovery. Pegasus reaches toward Greek inheritance and Papou's grandfather, whose immigration to the United States in the 1950s functions as muse and metaphor. Greek memory, American childhood, domestic consumption, and tropical experience are compressed into one object. The sculpture does not reconstruct the past accurately. It teleports between times and locations to create an artifact that could not have existed in any single one of them.

The relationship between private self and artistic persona introduces another dimension of Papou's practice, as evident in these works.

Andy Warhol offers the familiar counterpoint. Warhol cultivated a deliberately aloof public image through his silver wigs, sunglasses, minimal interviews, and mechanical language. The distance was productive. "Andy Warhol" became both a person and a cultural construction. The persona served as mask, artwork, shield, brand, and method. Papou's public identity functions differently. She also possesses a recognizable visual persona: the mononym, the painted body, the studio sanctuary, the hands pressed into pigment, the tropical surroundings, and the language of intuition, madness, joy, ancestry, and rebirth. But the persona does not seem designed to conceal the private person so much as amplify her.

Papou's spirituality, physicality, family history, motherhood, memory, and studio ritual all enter the work in this exhibition. The painted artist and the private person appear to share the same body. Her persona is not one of mechanical distance. It is built through exposure. No artistic identity is entirely unconstructed. Even sincerity becomes legible through choices about photographs, language, clothing, titles, exhibitions, and public presentation. Yet Papou's construction depends upon insisting that the art and life remain permeable. She does not disappear behind the product. She places bodily evidence inside it. For Warhol, the artist could become a machine. For Papou, the artist becomes a conduit. Papou's work does not require the viewer to adopt a religious belief.

Her coded language gives structure to the journey. Her physical process supplies the evidence. Like speaking in tongues, the mark possesses rhythm before translation. Like divination, the artist acts and then interprets what has appeared. Like ecstatic worship, the body becomes the location through which an invisible force is made externally perceptible. Like ceremonial dance, meaning is carried through the complete body rather than through language alone. Her paintings chase back, crawl back, and teleport back until the visible surface opens. What returns is not a complete memory or a rational explanation. It is a smear, a handprint, an animal, a smile, a carton, a pool, a fragment of language.

It is evidence that the artist entered another dimension of herself and brought something back.

Follow art writer, advisor, and artist Gabriel Diego Delgado on Instagram and Substack for more.

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