Do Avesso Paulo Monteiro

The recent exhibition of Paulo Monteiro is one of his most inventive. The artist unfolds the questions of his work in different means and absorbs new meanings from the ungovernable paste with which he has been working for years.

Many of the canvases are almost monochromatic, made of a thick layer of paint that loans a homogeneity to the surface. However, Monteiro also thins areas with of brush. He moves a small portion of the thick layer to another space. This subtle dislocation, recollective of the work by Willys de Castro, removes the integrity of color reveals it to be an object on canvas. The paint is no longer color, adjective, but a thing, a noun. But that is no advantage for it.

Besides constantly reversing the sense of colors in his paintings and in the molds for his sculptures, he also creates objects that make us look at strips of metal, paper and sticking tape, cardboard, nails, ropes, and laminated paper inside out.

The artist always takes advantage of the tense relationship between the contours and the paste. By molding his sculptures, he reveals the viscosities and the slippery aspect of the material more than actually conforming it. And this is because the mold, in art history, was the instrument used to make a flexible matter gain a stable and permanent definition in a recognizable form.

When we observe to some of the small wall reliefs, the molding gesture of Monteiro largely deforms symmetric shapes, allowing the paste to leak to the sides of whatever is giving it shape. Therefore, the gesture does not bring the form to the surface, but instead it reveals the matter. He also employs dislocations often so that whatever was down words will be turned upright, and whatever was in front could is set backwords.

In older sculptures, the artist worked with this relationship as a kind of instability, so the shape seemed to be coming apart. We could see the gesture of the sculptor always losing to the material, a sort of gag, in which he tried to create shape in material that continuously come undone. It is clear that, here, the presence of the material is strong. But from subtle dislocations, the new exhibition by Paulo Monteiro makes us observe things from inside out, like crepe paper apparently hold together glued by strips of bond paper.

– Tiago Mesquita