Untitled

CHAMBER PAINTING
João Queiroz’s painting is a permanent exercise on the conditions of procedure of painting itself, on its practice and the connection of the pictorial image to the visible world and the phenomenology of sight, but also an embodied reflection on the body that paints.
João Queiroz’s methodology starts from the use of a classical typology of painting: landscape. Landscape has been the form par excellence for making images of the world since the 16th century, and has embodied many of the procedures of painting as an artistic discipline, with particularly great importance in the 17th and 19th centuries.
These traditional typologies of major western painting were fundamental for a reflection on the way we think the visible world, but above all on how we organize it, how we grant it hierarchy before our eyes.
The history of painting has been a history of attempts at understanding of perception, but also of how visual perception performs representations that make us see the social, political and aesthetic space, how we build images of the world – which is valid for Dutch landscape painting and the way it shows us the division of the property that was hard-gained from the sea as well as being valid for German romantic landscape and the way it speaks of the subject and the sublime.
It is through a deep awareness of these historical and aesthetic processes of painting that João Queiroz produces his landscape paintings and even his watercolours, albeit taking landscape as a frame and not as a discourse. The latter, of which the Caixa Geral de Depósitos possesses a considerable nucleus resulting from the exhibition Queiroz held in 2006 in the Chiado 8 gallery (an exhibition organized by Culturgest), are small chamber paintings – in contrast to the “symphonic” character of his larger works.
The watercolour is an outdated type of painting, belonging to a tradition of painting as a very specific skill, particularly as it admits to no correcting; that is, the whole of its making process remains visible, like wrinkles on skin.
João Queiroz’s use of watercolour has a role in his working process – it follows the use of drawing, and it is a way of materially thinking out oil paintings. However, its technical specificity grants it the importance of forming a demanding and problematic field of procedures, precisely due to not allowing any mistakes.
It begins to become clear that João Queiroz’s procedure lies in the physical process of producing an image in relation to the history of painting, never making painting a battery of visual signs that form metaphors or allegories of the world through their grammar, but rather producing a visual field that is tactile and corporalised – because making it depends on the gesture of the body that paints it.
These pictorial chamber works that are watercolours form one of the moments of that ritual of making – which is not only making the image we see, but the making of the artist’s body itself. And when we look at these little, fascinating paintings we see, in their luminous liquidity, a hidden performance that is written in each mark on the paper that cannot be erased.

Delfim Sardo