José Loureiro
12 Apr - 25 May 2012
JOSÉ LOUREIRO
Luz Máxima
12 April - 25 May, 2012
The first and until the present, last show of José Loureiro (Mangualde, Portugal, 1961) in Distrito 4 was in the Autumn of 2008, with the title Minibar. My first contact with his work and the artist himself was a few months before, due to my participation in the catalogue edited by the Centro Cultural Vila-Flor with the collaboration his galleries in Portugal (Cristina Guerra), Viena (Grita Insam) and from Madrid (Distrito 4 Contemporary Art Gallery).
That show discovered for our scene an artist interested in painting over painting, and convinced that paintings give way to other paintings, a double assertion that his painting approaches well known territories both for some Spanish painters and by other outsiders but complicit in a peaceful invasion of abstraction. His work was then characterized by the almost absolute relevance that he gave to the structure of the work and to the importance of having all matters relevant occurs on the canvas. Also, the importance without order, but functional, of the brush stroke – “where we find superposition, the repetition and rhythm”. You could appreciate, immediately, a strict reduction of the visual dispositive, of the ones limited by participation and fragmentation through the order and participation of the surface, exploring the multiple options of the shape of the painting inside the painting, and in the most complex proposals, he abolished the orthodoxy of orthogonality.
The main work of the exhibition that gives its title is Luz máxima, a more domestic version of Bosão de L. that, now, with a area That, now, measures 200 x 542 cm, acquires connotations of a painting more that of a mural and looses in velocity what it gains in intensity and concentration. Interestingly, in this case the colors used are only 19, because the black piece is repeated in the two columns. Its dialog with its companion piece, Sin título, 2012, composed of a single longitudinal module that is later added on five minor modules, allows you to calibrate the different and distinct visual suggestions that each one projects. In some way, both are suspended in the space that they generate.
A remote history of the composition of Luz máxima could be the installation Sin título that Loureiro created in 1998, a mural of more than than three meters high by seventeen wide, for the Montepio Geral de Setubal. There, ceramic bars of the same length, separated by equal distances vertically and horizontally, marked by drums excavated, were a display of lights and shadows before the wall of the building. A scientist, the physic João Seixas, appreciates and is convinced that the White color is present in Bosão de L and in Luz maxima – although in a smaller scale – as an emptiness in a elementary and cosmic scale, that constitutes the universe.
Both works play a dichotomous game between existence and presence, anchored in the brushwork and the color, and the emptiness of nothing, that is more than a energy field. Dichotomy or dispute of equals is appreciable from his drawings of the mid-nineties, -as we saw at the exhibition in As piores flores en el centro Culturgest, de Lisboa–, although in these examples figuration that was directly extracted from double images, play a more literary sentimental role than in his current abstractions, radical yes, but played, always, as a referential halo.
march 2012
-Mariano Navarro-
Luz Máxima
12 April - 25 May, 2012
The first and until the present, last show of José Loureiro (Mangualde, Portugal, 1961) in Distrito 4 was in the Autumn of 2008, with the title Minibar. My first contact with his work and the artist himself was a few months before, due to my participation in the catalogue edited by the Centro Cultural Vila-Flor with the collaboration his galleries in Portugal (Cristina Guerra), Viena (Grita Insam) and from Madrid (Distrito 4 Contemporary Art Gallery).
That show discovered for our scene an artist interested in painting over painting, and convinced that paintings give way to other paintings, a double assertion that his painting approaches well known territories both for some Spanish painters and by other outsiders but complicit in a peaceful invasion of abstraction. His work was then characterized by the almost absolute relevance that he gave to the structure of the work and to the importance of having all matters relevant occurs on the canvas. Also, the importance without order, but functional, of the brush stroke – “where we find superposition, the repetition and rhythm”. You could appreciate, immediately, a strict reduction of the visual dispositive, of the ones limited by participation and fragmentation through the order and participation of the surface, exploring the multiple options of the shape of the painting inside the painting, and in the most complex proposals, he abolished the orthodoxy of orthogonality.
The main work of the exhibition that gives its title is Luz máxima, a more domestic version of Bosão de L. that, now, with a area That, now, measures 200 x 542 cm, acquires connotations of a painting more that of a mural and looses in velocity what it gains in intensity and concentration. Interestingly, in this case the colors used are only 19, because the black piece is repeated in the two columns. Its dialog with its companion piece, Sin título, 2012, composed of a single longitudinal module that is later added on five minor modules, allows you to calibrate the different and distinct visual suggestions that each one projects. In some way, both are suspended in the space that they generate.
A remote history of the composition of Luz máxima could be the installation Sin título that Loureiro created in 1998, a mural of more than than three meters high by seventeen wide, for the Montepio Geral de Setubal. There, ceramic bars of the same length, separated by equal distances vertically and horizontally, marked by drums excavated, were a display of lights and shadows before the wall of the building. A scientist, the physic João Seixas, appreciates and is convinced that the White color is present in Bosão de L and in Luz maxima – although in a smaller scale – as an emptiness in a elementary and cosmic scale, that constitutes the universe.
Both works play a dichotomous game between existence and presence, anchored in the brushwork and the color, and the emptiness of nothing, that is more than a energy field. Dichotomy or dispute of equals is appreciable from his drawings of the mid-nineties, -as we saw at the exhibition in As piores flores en el centro Culturgest, de Lisboa–, although in these examples figuration that was directly extracted from double images, play a more literary sentimental role than in his current abstractions, radical yes, but played, always, as a referential halo.
march 2012
-Mariano Navarro-