Category: writing

Coco Capitan continues her exploration of writing as a vital gesture. Words on Paper brings together her ironic and intimate aphorisms — delicate fragments of fleeting thoughts.

Words on Paper presents itself as the follow-up to If You’ve Seen It All, Close Your Eyes (2019). This new book brings together Coco Capitán’s recent notes, still tinged with irony and sometimes accompanied by sketches. Every day, she records her words, moods, questions, and impressions on a variety of surfaces, with an almost compulsive spontaneity.

Caught in the moment or crafted as true poems, her aphorisms appear as well on a green-checked napkin as on the pristine page of a notebook. The words are scribbled, crossed out, circled, underlined, and sometimes accompanied by a date or heading, revealing the time and place of their creation.

Unlike If You’ve Seen It All, Close Your Eyes, Words on Paper includes full-colour pages showing the original surfaces from which these writings emerged, offering the reader an immersive glimpse into the artist’s creative process.

In this collection of stories scribbled on paper, Coco Capitán captures her spontaneous thoughts. Her handwritten typography, featuring inverted letters, crossings-out, and annotations, takes shape in a world tinged with humor and irony.

“If you’ve seen it all, close your eyes” presents extracts from a decade of artist Coco Capitán’s handwritten notebooks. Coco Capitán has always scribbled down her thoughts – everywhere, all the time – often on scraps of paper that have filled notebook after notebook. From her first day in London in 2010 until now, and as she travels the world on photography assignments, Coco Capitán’s writings grant an insight into her free and instinctive creative process. Playful aphorisms and short poems address an array of issues with hints of humour and irony. She combines the serious with the mundane as she shares in her first text-based book social, metaphorical or sentimental moments with her witty tone and distinctive hand.