Pintura: Campo de Observação
by João Pinharanda, June 2021
(In memory of Julião Sarmento, who loved painting
and was infinitely curious.
I would have loved to hear his thoughts on this show.)
Painting: observation field
This exhibition was built upon a vast (but unavoidably incomplete) survey carried out in the
artist’s studios now producing painting in Lisbon — a survey that will be continued in other
geographical contexts — searching for other names (young and not-so-young artists) to
showcase many different examples of painting and abstract painting.
The artists in the show are mostly young or upcoming artists, but some have been active for a
longer time and bridge current and previous contexts. Nonetheless, historical names have been
purposely left out, most of whom are still active and whose production has been stable since
the 1970s.
We tried to avoid all historicist, comparative, or affiliational temptations concerning the
showcased artists. It should be vehemently pointed out that this exhibition does not intend to
produce a historical balance, nor to present any emerging conjuncture; this exhibition is not a
manifesto, it does not herald a wave of “new abstraction”, and the artists herein are not part,
and never were, of a unified group. This text is void of any intention to present an autonomous
aesthetic project.
Nevertheless, it is seemingly easy to note that, in the current moment in Portugal, there is a
strong pictorial production (with several origins and representing many universes) that, being
churned up by young artists recently out of school (and some still studying), finds its privileged
means of expression in abstraction — although the rigor of geometry is absent and some of
them even frequently introduce figurative elements. And yet, despite this empirical evidence,
this phenomenon has rarely been considered in critical reflection or taken as a whole by
curatorial practice. Our intention was to confirm, in numerous studio visits, the intuition of this
reality and, from there, create an exhibition.
Departing from a place free of preconceptions regarding the result of this investigation, it was
possible to perceive a set of guidelines that confirm all of painting’s tensions in the
contemporary context: the fragile lines that separate the practice of painting from certain
conceptual exercises involved in its production, the contamination between geometry and free
gesture, between this freedom and a certain para-figuration (in which floral references seem to
be dominant). These are the successive fields of affirmation where colour, matter, or their
absence, gesturality or its absence, the lack of a message or its rationalized, lyrical or ironic
sublimation, and also formal or decorative ploys, seem to be the elements always in play.
This ongoing investigation allowed us to realize that the individual sensibilities of each selected
artist do not overlay each other, they do not establish lines of continuity or mutual influence. In
other words, the “panorama” of the current time, which we can provisionally establish here,
confirms the historical, sociological and anthropological reality of Portuguese visual creation: it
is a heteronymic scene, hardly referenced to any historical continuity, with rare or absent links to
previous or contemporary national contexts but also disconnected from external contexts, or
assuming them always in a mode of miscegenation, contamination and hybridity.
These findings determined an exhibition dominated by visual (formal and chromatic) criteria.
Sérgio Fernandes clearly affirms the long and minute fabrication of his canvases, on whose
surface light seeks its full radiance and sensuality, density and sublimation more by subtraction
and distillation of colours than by additive processes.
Ana Manso gives us in a universe where the abstract gesture becomes form and colour and
where the dispersed multiplication of these elements and their vibration creates contact fields
between disciplines, languages and intentions: painting/tapestry, lyricism/musicality,
abstraction/decoration.
Marta Soares seeks a performative paroxysm of “making” that is not seen but is present in the
grandeur of her works and in the accumulation of heteroclite materials on her canvases,
simultaneously dirty and pure, dark and vibrant with a strange inner light.
Ana Luísa Jacinto's veils are pure testimonies of a proximity to distant landscapes that,
translucent and weightless, can also feel close or suggest the trail of angels cutting across the
space through which we move.
António Neves Nobre has four works in this exhibition. Each one of them punctuates the show
with moments of surprise and commentary on themselves and on their surroundings.
Worthy of note, the rarefied use of pictorial material and the illusion of organic (or objectual)
effects that are created and accentuated by the chosen shapes: three “pupils” appearing at all
heights on the walls of the two rooms, for example.
There is a clear play of tensions between the shapes (geometric and reminiscent of the 1970s),
the gestures and free colours, the sometimes abstract (monochromatic) sometimes floral model
in the “shaped-canvas” paintings of Ana Cardoso. There are three, dispersed in the exhibition
space and all of them are resolved in the balance between the illusion of the geometric form
that composes the puzzle of the shaped-canvas and the superimposed painting that works as a
true camouflage, trapping their geometric base.
Rita Ferreira's large painting/drawing on paper is at the limit of floral patterning (which,
however, she systematically boycotts) and at the limit of chromatic saturation; two small paper
sheets, later on, maintain this internal ambiguity but undo figurative references until they
transform abstraction into a progressive fading of colours and disappearance of forms.
The two canvases by Mariana Gomes replicate themselves and intensely articulate three
elements: the matter is thick and irregular but seductive; the colours are glaring but balanced
according to the rules of the chromatic spectrum and open to pure joy; and the gesture,
apparently sloppy and chaotic, creates regular shapes that mask scholarly references.
Concerning Rui Neiva's two large paintings, we do not know whether we should give primacy
to the unusual shape of the canvases, or to the mechanical gesture that drags and mixes the
colours on their surfaces — they shine like ceramic panels and even gain dimension of
decipherable urban signs as testimonies of movement and velocity.
Rui Horta Pereira presents a long theory of successive sheets of paper, without formal or
chromatic imperatives. At first sight, they may seem very delicate paintings but in reality are the
records of the action of sunlight (over months, in different places and positions and exposure
times) on simple coloured cardboards — they work as well as random and impossible-to-read
meteorological records.
A game, without pieces and open to all possibilities of association, is perhaps the ideal solution
to close this set. Beatriz Coelho reminds us, in two diptychs created according to the
“traditional” rules of painting, of the undecidable boundary through which we move: the
chequered patterns of the two compositions are simultaneously geometric figures and
representations of chessboards: abstractions and objects, things and ideas.
The “observation field” is rich and diverse, its weight and depth result in the presentation of a
vast spectrum of languages (more contradictory than complementary) that range from purity to
an overload of elements, from lyricism to ironic commentary, and that, opening up multiple
avenues of work, justify the lack of completeness in the title of the exhibition and announce the
necessity to continue the prospective task here endeavoured.
Paris, June 10, 2021
João Pinharanda
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