The works displayed in the project room of Leiria’s Banco das Artes Galeria, by Pedro Pousada and curated by António Olaio, express an artistic language traceable somewhere between the first and second avant-gardes. These drawings and paintings inherit “the conquered qualities of the pictorial surface, its flat condition, from artists such as Bonnard or Matisse, but, more importantly, they celebrate the post-surface pictorial volumes of Tatlin, El Lissitzky and Malevich. Painting that embodies the ambiguity between the plane and what is projected forward, beyond it.” [1]

More than anything, we get the feeling of standing before a throng of people whose characters contain elements that range from homogeneity to idiosyncrasy. These pictorial entities bear their own times and ways of grasping reality, so much so that they appear to have taken its form, as if they were what they see, not a direct way of seeing, but the seeing that lingers within us once we have seen. Naturally, we may say that we are what we see, but not in such a plastic manner as in Pedro Pousada’s works, where the one being looked at, ultimately the exhibition visitor, has a hand in transmuting these faces. One question: will these be the same when their visibility period is over? Will anyone ever answer that question?

This is indeed one of painting’s paths: depicting the echo of reality, whilst recognising that looking inwards is more important than outwards. Literally speaking, the inside of the wall matters more than the outside. As such, painting is a sum of echoes, where the plastic gesture is just as significant as the absence of a gesture, or where the very absence of a gesture can also, ultimately, be plastic. Where the creative gesture eventually succumbs to the destructive gesture. These decisions are consciously or unconsciously made by anchoring them in the fabric of art history, often relayed through time more by gesture than by any other means, in an age-old construction always within the medium housing a work. When the world comes to an end, the real that ceases to exist belongs to another, older painting.

The latency of living, the matter resonating between life and the living, lies in the hands of contemporaneity, not just in “new painting”, but in every other practice that, without any qualms whatsoever, tackles that which is unspeakable for now, with the Romantic certainty that, even if we cannot say it now, that does not mean that we will never be able to express it. This action, this walking into the wall, may symbolise the quest for the essence of the work of art, the layer that reveals nothing, yet makes it all felt. A pursuit to define that reverberation between the individual and existence, in this case allegorised through the relationship between painting and its supporting wall.

Pela Parede Dentro by Pedro Pousada is showing at Banco das Artes Galeria (BAG) until March 3, 2024.

[1] From the exhibition text by António Olaio.