[open the box] José Loureiro

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?

Biography
José Loureiro was born in Mangualde, in 1961, and lives and works in Lisbon. He graduated in Painting at the Escola Superior de Belas-Artes de Lisboa in 1987, having exhibited for the first time in that same year. Since then he has shown his works in several different Portuguese and foreign galleries and museums, with special mention for the exhibition at the Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Serralves (Oporto, 2002) and this most recent show at the Centro Cultural Vila-Flor (Guimarães, 2008). He is represented in several private and institutional collections, such as that of the Centro de Arte Moderna – Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian (Lisbon), the Fundação Luso-Americana para o Desenvolvimento (Lisbon) or the Fundação Carmona e Costa (Lisbon).

Bibliography
José Loureiro, Lisboa, Relógio D’Água Editores, 2001.
José Loureiro (cat.), Guimarães, Centro Cultural Vila-Flor, 2008.