I stare at the canvas, absorbed, whilst outside, away from my utter aloofness, all could be crashing down. I linger and bask in the sheer pleasure offered by Joana Villaverde’s elegant paintings in the My Pleasure exhibition at Galerias Municipais de Lisboa – Pavilhão Branco, in Lisbon.

Through her canvases, the artist succeeds in expressing the joy she experiences when colouring. The satisfaction it provides her. I marvel at her gestures, her smooth movements, the patches she outlines on the canvas. The time taken for the gesture, the contemplation. The sharing of that bliss.

Villaverde opens her house to welcome us.

Like doors, the long canvases blanket me with their skies and places, with an astonishing weightlessness. They invite me in and draw my head up in an attempt to grasp the work. I try to dominate them. I feel bewildered – even off balance. They finally lead my eyes to a turmoil in their gesture, to a captivating brushstroke. They sweep me away to a very distant place. Quite different from what the daily news seems keen to tell us. I finally escape. Even from myself.

Villaverde’s oil paintings turn into pure perception.

I notice long canvases muttering red tones. Are these flames? Others sensuously shape yellowish ripples, submerged in blue intonations, then streaked with pale tones, like Fragonard’s clouds. In the 1766 painting Les Hasard Heureux de l’Escarpolette, by the same painter, mentioned[1] by the artist, a female figure can be seen among leafy trees, swaying in the air, and reinforces the delight with which she distractedly indulged in the bliss of the moment. The figure is hovering in a dazzling glow of skies that roll over her body – perhaps to prevent her attention from being bound or tied solely to the voluptuousness and eccentricities of her lover, who is watching her as she swings.

Villaverde explains that it is a work ‘without any figurative obligations’, but my mind drifts to the lusciousness of the clouds and the skies that envelop us in awe.

Some skies contain landscapes, like the canvas Vigia (2024). Skies within skies. They emphasise the idea, one after another, that the painting is unfolding, or coiling up, plunged into boundlessness, into infinity, as the artist says.

José Gil once reportedly commented on a certain painting: ‘Strange and powerful piece. The moment I look at it, I’m immediately transported by a centrifugal movement that flings me into the air, spinning like a propeller from right to left, anti-clockwise. This is a whirling motion of a spiral expanding in space. I’m hit by it and start rotating in the air as I look at it from a fixed point, right here. Well, here? Where, right here, if that movement has led me away and is pushing me further and further apart, plucking me out of this place to some place I don’t know where?’[2].

This is precisely the point: where? Where are Villaverde’s canvases leading us? Without trying to tread a risky hypothetical line, the truth is that the height at which the canvases are exhibited forces a sort of aerobic effort. The inability to glimpse them in their entirety, being left to only detail a few parts, once again brings me back to that painting by Fragonard cited by the artist. Are we the female figure rippling and unsteadily on the swing, or rather the lover lurking between the weave of her skirts?

Perhaps Villaverde’s abstractionism stems from a desire to evade reality and life. Perhaps Villaverde’s abstractionism is echoed in Ad Reinhardt’s words: ‘What about the reality of the everyday world and the reality of painting? Those are not the same realities.”[3]

My Pleasure is at Pavilhão Branco until February 9, 2025.

[1] One of the works featured in My Pleasure, with the title Uma espécie de Fragonard V (2024).
[2] Gil, J. (2015). Poderes da Pintura. Antropos. Relógio D’Água, pp. 9-10.
[3] Harrison, C. (1994). Abstract Expressionism. Concepts of Modern Art. From Fauvism to Postmodernism. Thames and Hudson, p. 170.