[open the box] João Queiroz

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.

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.

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.

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.

Biography
João Queiroz was born in 1957 in Lisbon, where he lives and works. He graduated in Philosophy at the Universidade de Lisboa. He has exhibited since the nineteen eighties, with special note for the following exhibitions: Pintura e desenho, Porta 33 (Madeira, 1994), Ein Leuchtturm ist ein traurige und glücklicher Ort, Akademie der Künste (Germany, 1999), Densidade relativa, Centro de Arte Moderna – Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian (CAM-FCG, Lisbon, 2005), Entre linhas – desenhos da Fundação Luso-Americana para o Desenvolvimento, Culturgest (Lis- bon, 2005), João Queiroz, pintura, Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian (Lisbon, 2006). In 2000 he received the EDP Drawing Prize. He is represented in the collections of the Fundação Luso-Americana para o Desenvolvimento (Lisbon), the Fundação EDP (Lisbon), CAM-FCG (Lisbon), the Museu de Arte Contemporânea do Funchal, the Fundação de Serralves (Oporto) and the Museo Extremeño e Iberoamericano de Arte Contemporáneo (Badajoz), among others. For 2010 he is preparing a retrospective exhibition for Culturgest in Lisbon.

Bibliography
Liber studiorum, de João Queiroz, Lisboa, Parque Expo 98 S.A., 2001.
João Queiroz, pintura (cat.), Lisboa, Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, 2006.