We entered the gallery and realize a large drawing, on the wall called The Rest is Silence, from 2020. The drawing, which gives the exhibition its name, features discs drawn in graphite and acrylic pen. The same disks develop one after the other. Some seem to converge, others to diverge. In a game between concave and convex, between full and empty.

On the other side, in another room, the one closest to the entrance, some small drawings, in a row, reveal an underlying and evident geometry. One grid, or plot, supports all compositions. Some tend to resemble sheet music, appear to be rhythmic poems, which demonstrate a common origin, the same principle, the same base, coined in permanence.

The series Through the blue, 2019, reveals drawings made using graphite, ink pen and acrylic on craft paper. Patterns, dots, or crosses are generated on the paper surface, and in a change of colour. They are shapes and lines that are transmuted.

It is necessary to deterritorialize the dot. Escape from modernist memory. Of the materiality of painting. Transpose of the elements. First, in some drawings, especially the Mandalas, straight lines of different colours provide parallels on craft paper. There is continuity, yet there is also room for the need to break with what is expected.

These surfaces, with vigorous and firm lines, are then cut and glued, becoming three-dimensional, regular or irregular shapes. The lines thus also travel through space beyond the surface of the paper.

The form that shapes the space is still present in the practice of Bruno Castro Santos, knowing that his basic training is architecture. The lines transition from two-dimensional to three-dimensional form is done with great ease.

The straight line, as an abstract element, is like the outmost protagonist. It emerges from paper, far from its original function, as its own and subsidiary element of representativeness.

Far from being also subordinated to the representation of figures, the line expands, takes shape, as the main element.

As Kandinsky would say: “freed from its practical purpose, and from the slavery of its applications”.

The graphic elements manifested in the work of Bruno Castro Santos are evoked, such as the point, the line, the plane. The point is highlighted, as being endowed with autonomy. Isolated from the material surroundings, as well as away from the “utilitarian practice” function, as known past in the 19th century.

According to Kandinsky, the point varies according to the relationship that is established with other graphic elements: “what can be consolidated as a point on a totally empty surface of this being designated as a surface on the same base surface that joins if a final line” relationship with, relationship with other elements, and with the surface. As the painter would say, a relationship of “interiority, exteriority”:

Bruno Castro Santo proceeds in this way, falling in love with the plot, the structure, the grid so original and generative in Mondrian’s modernism, and intensely referred to by Krauss, but at the same time, by the tracing, by the demarcation of this same modernist principle. It also demonstrates a new era and a taste for rupture.

Until March 26 at Rui Freire – Fine Art, in Lisbon.