O burel da cortina antepara o céu opaco

Appleton Square
Lisboa
April 10th // May 10th, 2014

Drawing and painting are taken to extremes in the work of Pedro Calapez : the scratch-out gesture is sometimes repeated so that brings us closer to a solid black; and his painting creates, for two decades, an excess of color and as strong physical matter – the metaphorical light and real matter – expressing sculptural and architectural virtues .

Still, everything is achieved using a vocabulary that we can reduce to essentials – divided, however, between two poles : the gesture in obsessive and superimposed tracing (the drawings) or very large spatula strokes, thick blocks of colour (in painting) ; texture and volume ( in paintings) or its absence (in digitally printed designs); regular trimming of the structures (in the case of polygons shown) or the more undisciplined irregularity (in the case of many other paitnigs not shown here) ; the painting structures, sturdy, strong (metal for the paintings) or fragile (paper drawings); and finally (or, for the record, in the first place ), color as opposed to black / white.

João Pinharanda – April 2014