THE STUBBORNNESS OF THE GRID

 

Paulo Venancio Filho

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We are facing a painting that doesn’t engage in superficialities so present in a certain present-day painting, that is, so to speak, a painting that puts aside and withdraws from Painting. It still conserves the canvas, the chassis, the surface, but this surface is just a “screen”, maybe a “monitor” like so many others, in which, consequently, “figures” come and go, without remaining there and without entrenching themselves, and then, go someplace else, sliding from surface to surface. If there’s an effect here, an “artifice”, it’s the one of investing the possible wisdom of painting in a contemporary “speech”. [..]

THE FIFTH HARD EDGE

 

Paulo Venancio Filho

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The sharp, hard surface shows unquestionably that an impenetrability impedes any further approach. It is a stop sign. Therefore, the canvas en bloc must approach the viewer, as though its identification with the wall also had to be blocked. Nevertheless, this physical de-identification does not succeed in obliterating a more fundamental identity. Canvas and wall share the blindness of matter. But from the hardness of the wall, we still extract familiar signs, some shelter. [..]

PAINTING AS A NOUM

 

Guilherme Bueno​

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One of the biggest problems we encounter when discussing the current state of painting consists of shifting from a generalizing analysis to an objective viewpoint. Objective, to be read here in the literal sense of the word. Therefore, speaking of painting in its material sense is not restricted to an approach rooted in the still-necessary critical questioning of the boundary between modernity and post-modernity, the touchstone of which, as a rule, has been to challenge the striking metalinguistic character of 20th century production. Rather, when we make use of this “material objectivity” of painting today we emphasize something elementary yet important to say — it’s condition can only be ascertained upon direct contact with an oeuvre and an inquiry into our experience that the works provoke. [..]