I walk through JOH’s exhibition Solve et Coagvla at Galeria Sá da Costa and stumble upon the first canvas, entitled Avalon.

The painter binds us to the titles of his paintings. I become entangled in the game I play between the names assigned to the works and the forms they display. Soon, at the beginning, a clash takes place, a fracture. The names Wabi Sabi, Magma, Hocus Pocus, Clepsidra, Stabat palpitate and resonate in the poetic sound of the titles, and represent a distant, autonomous reality of their own.

The suspension, the disruption also stems from, and is made known by, the concept of object painting itself, emerging, thickening and becoming present as a sculptural form. But it is positioned and presented on the wall. I have no qualms about it being a painting, but it involves a plastic vagueness that I can understand, and which positions it in an uncertain place between painting and sculpture. An altarpiece, maybe? Stripped of its sacred function, of a ‘being behind the altar’, nevertheless understood by the same tension, expressed in what can be glimpsed in the act, in the groove of the dense surface, on the wooden support.

The same work displays pictorial and sculptural properties. I remembered the work of Frank Stella and his Empress of India (1969), flashy, rectilinear, blooming in different directions, glorifying both the linear qualities and the flat, thick and assertive background.

I can also envision JOH, Jorge Humberto, absorbed in the effort behind the solid, automated gesture, pouring the thinness of the dripping onto the stiff support. In oil strokes, which are thrown, but not necessarily on a straight plane. With mechanical gestures. The silence urges the shapes on, and the shadows let the paint slip deep into the grooves.

I continue to be reminded of Stella[1]. The lines are there, parallel, straight, subtle, shedding light on the qualities of geometry, abstraction and the art that spent a good part of the twentieth century in the grip of modernism and then the essentialism of the artists involved in the reductionist and minimalist approaches.

In JOH’s work Skop, I can see a shape, or a cluster of shapes, breaking out of the two-dimensional support. Resembling cubes or a citadel, consisting of a small clump of houses with their dark windows, they tempt me to look for the most stable architectural layout. I make an attempt to take in the view, to unwind. But without visible success. The stimulus is contradictory, revealing yet another ambiguity within the realm of impossible representations.

Other perceptive and challenging stimuli feature in the Gestalt 2 diptych. They bring to mind the colourful, cut-out paintings Mach II and Lapse that Kenneth Noland offered us in 1964 and 1976. JOH’s two paintings look as if they run counter to the flat nature of the wall that supports them. Their joint arrangement leads me to recognise a bulging cube, two sides of which have ovular shapes, as if they were two eyes scanning us.

JOH’s work also contains something shamanic, ritualistic and magical in its gestures, something that the exhibition’s host José Sousa Machado managed to spot and capitalise on in his text covering the exhibition: Os conhecedores dos desenhos.

Sousa Machado favours the linear and ritualistic nature of JOH’s pieces by comparing them to the sand drawings sona, unveiled by the Tshokwe people, who live in Angola’s north-eastern provinces. Machado found in them procedural parallels with JOH’s paintings.

Machado adds about these sona drawings: ‘Legends, songs, fables, passages from oral literature, riddles or mere charades are recounted as the drawings are made, forming the mythographic fabric of their figurative aesthetic, through which Quioco people’s ancestral culture is preserved.’

The entangling, the braiding, the weaving can all be seen in JOH’s creations, ‘’with due regard for the historical, cultural and socio-economic differences‘’, as Sousa Machado points out.

We are left with the meshing of simple filaments, a magical dancing of lines, undulating on the one hand and rectilinear on the other, on top of strong, homogeneous and dense matter. This is a controlled manifestation of painting that has a Greenbergian acknowledgement of its own material, of its support, of the quest for monochrome and polychrome.

The painting set alternates between paintings with cut-out and rectangular shapes. Like handwriting, there are intersecting formations, as can be seen in Clepsidra, Stratos or Stabat. Or in circular discs such as Proton, FM and Proton 2, revealing the dripping technique that JOH is flawless at.

The exhibition is at Galeria Sá da Costa until February 22, 2025.

[1] In The Marriage of Reason and Squalor, II. 1959, and also Turkish Mambo, 1967