When despair for the world grows in me

and I wake in the night at the least sound

in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,

I go and lie down where the wood drake

rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.

I come into the peace of wild things

who do not tax their lives with forethought

of grief. I come into the presence of still water.

And I feel above me the day-blind stars

waiting with their light. For a time

I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

• The Peace of Wild Things, Wendell Berry, 1968

Themes of uncertainty and the struggle and longing to be at peace with it have always been woven into Paolo Icasas’ works. Uncertainty, instead of being feared, is embraced in Weightless. Somewhere deep in the inescapable pit of mulling over anxieties and what-ifs, the artist daydreams of letting go — of giving up control and unburdening the self of self-imposed expectations. In the daydreaming there grows a desire for detachment; detachment from the self, the world, all that is held dear — detachment from time, from aging, from death, from life itself — hoping that a detached and unburdened state would bring forth ease.

Noticeably lighter and pale, Icasas’ works were created as visual attempts to satiate his desire for ease however brief; to be the opposite of all that’s heavy and tense and dense and opaque. Perhaps to be the vapor that has become of rain upon touching hot pavement; perhaps to be the gentler lull after a gentle gust of wind; to be an echo of a hissy whisper; to be that ghost of a pause between breaths; to be that vacuum before thought becomes movement; to exist as an idea that may never find form; to exist as a form that may never be known; to be a nothing and a something in the blur of everything; to be of no weight, bear no weight, no name, no promises; to be a droplet of mist in the haze; to slide into obscurity; to be dangerously close to empty; to be free.

– Marionne Contreras