Painting, drawing, sculpture-painting and installation; canvas, paper and aluminium supports; the use of lines, brushstrokes and broad strokes; the mastery of colours and textures, as well as their absence; two-dimensionality and three-dimensionality; the abstract undertone, the omission of the human figure and the emergence of atmospheres: all these elements run through Pedro Calapez’s (1953) artistic practice and are evident in the new works on display at Galeria Fernando Santos, in Porto.

Enquanto o espaço for challenges the viewer to look at the artist’s work in an attempt to elicit a reaction and reflect on what is beyond representation, on what is not and what is not being seen, to perceive the space and question it. “In many ways, my work is about space, about the way people see it, about distance, how they feel inside a given space, if they are nearer to its boundaries, if they have a sense of endlessness (…), if that space disturbs them.”[1]

The exhibition’s title, inspired by a text by Maria Zambrano about nothingness and non-being – as a aspect of reality that challenges the being to fully manifest itself – in the book Man and the Divine, indicates, as Calapez puts it, “a state of possibility: as long as we have space, we can do things (…), as long as it is there, I will have a place to work in it”[2], from where the works emerge to reveal contrasts.

Running through the exhibition, we observe painting becoming drawing, or being converted into three-dimensional objects, and we witness drawing becoming painting and structuring itself as such, in a complementary and merging relationship between practices that address space. Likewise, we discern a continuum which the artist pursues in presenting, installing and assembling the different works, finding solutions in the relationship with space itself which enhance the works’ discursive rationale. Moving from one image to another, between the spaces they fill and benefiting from conflicting perspectives, we see a never-ending story in which the sequential rupture is mutated into another kind of continuity, made possible by how much weight Calapez gives to setting up the exhibition, making room for the different works – defining how they are perceived by the viewer – and elaborating visual dynamics. On the other hand, we should also stress the importance of positioning the viewer’s sight and its fulfilment within the visual field provided by the works – based on an all-round approach -, inviting and triggering different ways of seeing and challenging the viewer to different sensations.

In Enquanto o espaço for, we freely transition between the exhibition space and the works, whose different media, techniques and materials excite our attention, revealing combinations and contrasts as we move through the different series on display. As soon as we enter the gallery and contemplate the six works in mixed media on paper from the series Uma forma incisiva sobre a realidade (2024), we are shown the possibilities of abstraction. These are abstract works, but suggest forms developed through contrasts and how colours are applied to space, using loose brushstrokes and stains fluctuating between the visible and the invisible, movement and subtlety, transparency and luminosity. While admiring the colours, shapes and gestures, we see brief flashes of one colour on top of another in some of the works in this series, and all of them contain lines, whether with intensity and dynamism or as a hint. Going from the two-dimensionality and directness of the works on paper in the previous set, we switch to the coldness of aluminium as a support in the technical and formal layout of the painting which, as it takes over the space, departs from the wall and becomes a three-dimensional object in the series Do Lado de cá (2024) and Instável Permanência (A e B) (2023). Faced with the architecturally structured panels, made industrially in aluminium, laser-drawn and cut, simultaneously revealing a handmade approach to paint usage, the artist opens up a range of compositional, volumetric and scaling considerations. Throughout both series, our attention roams over the front, painted surface of the aluminium boxes, where distance from the wall is achieved and depth is given a leading role. By occupying the walls in different ways, we notice the heterogeneity of the modular shapes featured in both series: flat and vertical, in Instável Permanência; convex and ordered in parallel in two horizontal rows, in Do lado de cá, engaging in a dialogue and confrontation between differing ways of painting abstract representations, which, depending on the type of paint used – oil in the first set and acrylic in the second – lead to a different visual result.

We let ourselves be swept away in the same space by the new monumental acrylic paintings and their ability to bring places to mind, such as the vastness of the sky in Sonho a noite #03 (2024). We drift between the paintings and colour planes flitting beyond the canvases’ surface, engaging in a colour-light interaction, rhythm and vibration manifested in the two-dimensional space. We perceive contrasts, scale and feel their spatiality as we observe, against these traditional and overflowing canvases, Recortado #08 (2024), a work on aluminium in which the painting window itself is strewn with gaps and cut-outs, offering a dialogue with the emptiness of the wall and putting the painting’s surface up for discussion. Facing the work, we can see through the gallery window a composition scattered across the front wall of the Cubo space, the installation Autumn leaves (2024). The work displays loose pieces that have been torn free from their supports, distorted and attached individually to the wall, resulting in a structure of uneven contours. The idea of fragmentation and the possibility of viewing the piece as a whole are remarkable, along with the breach of any symmetry and the presence of an underlying colour/shape balance and spatial connections.

A second exhibition moment, taking up the white walls of one room, features drawings rising from equally white paper backgrounds. The silver lines flowing across them are evidence of shapes that the artist subsequently employs in large scale, as templates for paintings and drawings. In the series Espaço (2024), the line seems to flow involuntarily and lightly, showing up sealed in some drawings and wide open in others, implying volumetric shapes, overviews of what a shape, a space can be, revealing as little as possible, through a drawing process that keeps its gestural nature and suspended character.

The last moment of the exhibition, held in the gallery shop, welcomes us into the verticality of two paintings in mixed media on paper from the series Um corpo entre outros (2020). These abstract works challenge the space itself, in which we see the pulsating colour splotches coating the surfaces by overlapping multiple layers, in a self-sufficient, silent painting that arouses our senses. Although non-gestural, these works reveal the extent of the artist’s body and gesture in their development, reminiscent of anthropomorphic forms. From the painting tradition, we are guided to yet another methodology pursued by Calapez: producing drawings whose existence begins on the computer and that materialise in different formats and media, namely digital printing. Generating and handling drawings by computer – allowing for different interactions with space and reimagining them according to the viewer’s perception – are brought to light in the two inkjet print sets that conclude the exhibition. In the upper area of the shop, expertly laid out along two intersecting white walls, we can see the 13 works of the series Espaços e Penumbras (2023), the drawing motions that form spaces and bring us to contrasting places, to chiaroscuro, light and shadow, density, obscurity and the unknown, all in a quest for reality. Unlike the gloom and the grey and black universe of the previous set, we are captivated by Mundo Lateral C (políptico) (2024), a large work (182 x 752cm) that requires us to distance ourselves before we can fully admire it. Its six giant vertical panels are arranged as a band, revealing anthropomorphic and irregular shapes successively spreading out from one another, within a story-telling sequence that stretches across the colour palette, both vibrant and joyful, with blue, green, yellow and orange-red tones. Facing the polyptych, we end our exhibition journey with Self #02 (2017), a self-portrait by the artist, whose face in the foreground and in profile, duplicated and as a black shadow, is confronting itself. On a tampered white background, colourful registers similar to small squares run through the space, the very space that, as long as it remains, the artist will continue to work in, emerging from it and inhabiting it, permanently striving to astonish.

Enquanto o espaço for by Pedro Calapez is showing at Galeria Fernando Santos until 9 June, 2024.

[1] Conversa no atelier do artista. Dalila Pinto de Almeida e Pedro Calapez. Directed by Igor Sterpin, 2024.
[2] Idem.