[open the box] Vítor Pomar

The black, white and grey stains on Vítor Pomar’s canvases seem to be a part of a greater continuum, of an enormous canvas of which we only see fragments. They are cuttings from a map of the act of painting itself, which Pomar made by covering the floor of his studio with the canvas, and then painted like a great cartography of his gesture on the horizontal, sweeping the floor with the marks that would later become isolated in paintings that thus took on their individuality.

The studio was, as he himself stated, his battlefield. In painting a continuum from which the canvases that would have a life of their own would be cut out, Vítor Pomar remade the story of the painting of Jackson Pollock and Franz Kline, constructing a genealogy of the painting itself, from the inscribing, ritual gesture to the limiting of the field of easel painting rejected in favour of a performing aspect of the act of painting.

Pomar’s procedure in the construction of his canvases seems to have come out of a cinematographic methodology, because they emerge from an idea of the pictorial space that, like the cinema space, is only possible because there is an “out of shot”.

These paintings are from a period of great productivity in his work, which would be followed by a pause of almost a decade and a half, during which he followed his spiritual questions, leading him to Buddhism, Zen thought and several different forms of encounter with the philosophies of the mind. He would return to his activity in painting through colour, almost at the exact point where he had left off his career at a moment when another instance of need overcame artistic practice.

And for that reason their enormous freedom breathes the tension that turns them into great works.

Biography
Vítor Pomar was born in 1949. In 1966-1967 he attended the course in Painting at the Escola de Belas- Artes do Porto, and in 1967-1969 the Escola de Belas-Artes de Lisboa. He held his first solo exhibition in 1970, the year when he emigrated to Holland, where he continued his studies, returning to Portugal in 1985. Between 1985 and 1999 he interrupted his artistic activity to devote himself to deepening spiritual issues. He has shown his works in many Portuguese and international institutions, with particular note for the anthological exhibition held at the Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Serralves, in Oporto (2003). His work is present in many collections, examples of which are the Fundação Luso-Americana para o Desenvolvi- mento (Lisbon), the Centro de Arte Moderna – Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian (Lisbon) and the Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Serralves (Oporto).

Bibliography
Vítor Pomar, o meu campo de batalha (cat.), Porto, Fundação de Serralves, 2003.
Vítor Pomar (cat.), Porto, Galeria Fernando Santos, 2004.