New Paintings Paulo Monteiro

Amid curves and returns, Paulo Monteiro finds room for his personal, playful, and pleasurable brand of experimentation. New Paintings, at Casa Iramaia, brings together recent small-format works composed of colors that play off one another, forms nested within forms, textures made of transparency, darkness, or absence, and edges that leave it unclear what is inside or outside, in front or behind. They extend the conversation between color, form, and line that Monteiro has been quietly and spontaneously developing since the start of his career.

Painted on linen or wood, the works are built from forms that move together like a dance with no single lead. They find countless ways to connect, cross, and mark boundaries, without ever going beyond what Monteiro considers the surface. Because the layered planes make no distinction between figure and ground, the viewer’s eye is as free to wander as Monteiro’s was while painting. Sometimes he starts from a clearly defined form, sometimes from layers of color and how they play against the ground.  
The wooden panels share this energy. Tall, narrow, and elongated, they recall the artist’s wall sculptures and let his landscapes stretch upward, beyond the horizon line. These same structures once served as bases for his tabletop sculptures. The resulting figures draw lines, trace the edges, spill past them, or grow out of them. Their small scale keeps the works close at hand, and Monteiro composes them with often meticulous care. He can paint them on the wall, in his lap, or at the easel without moving around, unlike larger canvases, where keeping the surface even is almost impossible.  
The long, curving, unpredictable strokes recall the drawings and prints he made in the 1990s. Drawing has been part of his practice since it began in the 1970s, though it is a practice he subsequently drifted from. Now he draws directly on the surface before painting. The gesture is back, and with it a new structure for the paintings, one that pushes outward while pulling color and line back in.  
The vibrant palette moves between warm and cool tones, creating harmonious contrasts that might seem unlikely at first. Following his instincts for color, Monteiro builds groups of works linked by affinity. As soon as he notices a pattern settling in, though, he changes course and tries contrasting combinations. Some paintings have just a single coat, letting the white ground glow through. Others are built up in countless layers, which makes them deep and dense. The possibilities are endless, with Monteiro’s main limit lying in saturation, in the loss of the natural order of things.
Monteiro’s new works carry everything his path has brought him, and each turn opens a new route rather than leading back to where he started. Rediscovering and working with the elements that matter to him, some of them unconscious, is what sustains his practice and what he enjoys more and more as an artist. As he puts it, “when you love what you do, you don’t run away from yourself.”