Fiada de carretéis 1 (Row of Spools 1)

“The almost black paintings from the early 1960s, the Fiadas de carretéis (Rows of Spools), do not come from merely formal investigations of pacific spaces of painting. Rather, they are convulsion in the actual act of painting, for the spools, in their strange linked tiers, are evidence of the assault on the paint material removed from the light. These are paintings whose facture demonstrates the gestures that form them, their own systematic connection, which emerge from within the paintings. A turbid modelling echoes through the paint material of these canvases, indelible traces of this assault of one layer of paint being compulsively laid on another, causing the spools to emerge from the ominous space that surrounds them.”
Mônica Zielinsky, "A inquietude da arte," in Mônica Zielinsky, Paulo Sergio Duarte and Sônia Salztein, Moderno no limite (Porto Alegre: Fundação Iberê Camargo, 2008), 119.