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REMAKING HISTORY
José Loureiro’s painting is about painting itself.
It is about the fact that a painting is necessarily a rectangle, or a square, which is put on a wall and which has a structure inside it made up of shapes and colours.
The apparent dissatisfaction of his canvases hides much more than what appears in them, or demands more attention, because they contain all the vicissitudes of the act of painting: the erasures, the hesitations and the corrections.
It doesn’t matter whether his paintings are figurative or abstract, because in the final analysis they are about that great tradition of producing images and about its history, namely about the moment in the 20th century when painting was under suspicion in the context of visual arts.
So his working area is painting, its historical determinations and internal issues. It is through painting that he works with the formal questions implied by the relations between image, its limitations and possibilities of development. This is always produced with a particular sense of métier, although without any canonical subservience.
He also equates the relationship with the manual aspect of painting through his interest in pop art and the relationship that some artists established in the sixties between the practice of painting and the use of mechanical processes, ranging from the stencil to serigraphy, as if it were necessary to liberate painting from the tyranny of the hand, of the gesture, in order to grant it freedom.
Whatever the case, José Loureiro needed to once again travel that path in successive amplification up to the point of it becoming a circle, and the circle into a colour field, into pictorial matter, into itself. And this, as befits painting, implies a compositional structure, a pattern; and the latter, naturally, a network, a grid. And suddenly beneath his painting there appeared the history of modernism. From the reference to the abstraction that derives from an absolute concreteness, from this to distrust of manufacture, to its yielding and from re-encountering itself in this collapse – the background/figure distinction – in order to deny it, once again, as a theory of the gesture. The brush-stroke is made serial, the series, due to repetition in illusory volume, invokes drawing, pretends to be a structure and becomes rarefied even on the chromatic level. Ironic, isn’t it?

Delfim Sardo

Details

  • Title: Palavras cruzadas VII
  • Creator: José Loureiro
  • Date Created: 1994
  • Location: Lisbon
  • Physical Dimensions: 200 x 200 cm
  • Type: Painting
  • Rights: © Culturgest - Fundação Caixa Geral de Depósitos
  • Medium: Oil on canvas
  • Photographer: © DMF, Lisboa
  • Inventory: 372515

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