[open the box] Jorge Queiroz

Jorge Queiroz’s drawings are a permanent flux, as if they were fragments of an endless visual history. In a book by Italo Calvino, If on a winter’s night a traveller, the possibility is raised of all books, all the stories in the world being no more than fragments of an enormous and endless narrative told by a far-off and secretive old man, where all writers would go and seek their fictions. Jorge Queiroz’s drawings seem to be the demonstration in drawing of that inexhaustible source of little visual narratives, allusions to comic situations, metamorphosed bodies, strange spaces, the enchanting or terrible visions, or just indifferent, or almost indiscernible. There seems to be no process of evolving in his work, only transformation, metamorphosis of one thing into another, one place into another, one sheet of paper into another.

Obviously there is the possibility of connecting Jorge Queiroz’s working methodology to the influence of Marcel Broodthaers, or to the visionary and surrealising character of Belgian art, but the unmistakable character of his exclusively drawing work (with sporadic sallies into painting and video) comes from a visual intelligence that transforms the drawing into a permanent visceral condition, for on each sheet he exposes the entrails of all of his previous and future drawings.

An exhibition by Jorge Queiroz is therefore a trip into his complex process of composing images starting from registers varying between the figuration of recognisable situations and doodling, between that which we recognise as references (curtains, stages, museum and gallery spaces, bodies) and a mesh of lines that define tensions, paths, failures or pyrrhic victories.

In their apparent spontaneity, these drawings are much more than that: they are almost-worlds, defining themselves as continuities between the series and within each one of them. They clearly possess a humour of their own, which is often strange; on other occasions they are games of visual signs. Above all they are lines that one can follow in that strange, difficult, apparently intuitive and very sophisticated possibility of generating forms on paper that exorcise our compulsion to represent

Biography
Jorge Queiroz was born in 1966, in Lisbon. He lives and works in Berlin. In 1991 he finished the Complete Plan of Studies in Painting at the Centro de Arte e Comunicação Visual (Lisbon), where he also took the Advanced Course in 1992-1993. In 1992 he studied at the Royal College of Art (London). Between 1997 and 1999 he took a Masters in Fine Arts at the New York School of Visual Arts. In 2004 he was a resident artist at the Künstlerhaus Bethanien (Berlin). He exhibited for the first time in 1987, beginning a diversified set of shows, most important among which are the exhibitions at the Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian (Lisbon, 1992), his participation at the Venice Biennial (2003), São Paulo Biennial (2004), Berlin Biennial (2006) and the exhibition at the Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Serralves (Oporto, 2007). He is represented in the collections of the Fundação Luso-Americana para o Desenvolvimento (Lisbon), Caixa Geral de Depósitos (Lisbon), Deutsche Bank – New York Corporate Art Collection (New York), Museum of Modern Art (New York) and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, among others. He received the Montepio Geral Prize in 1991.

Bibliography
Jorge Queiroz (cat.), Porto, Galeria Quadrado Azul, 2002.
Jorge Queiroz (cat.), Porto, Fundação de Serralves, 2007.