ISÓTOPO 

JOSÉ LOUREIRO

For more than 30 years, Portuguese painter Jose Loureiro has been working on a series of works, drawings and paintings he himself characterizes using three mysterious names: “bullfinch”, “filament” and “hoop”. “Bullfinch”: seems self-explanatory upon examination the colors and shapes of the small bird that never sets still, and has been surviving the deforestation of the Açores. “Filament” relates to Loureiro’s ambition to paint the instable, the sizzling character of the light, beyond its materialization. “Hoop”, because the shapes he draws are never straight, the circle he sketches are never full. We are in an in between. A shape is in the process of creation, or escape. Rebellious.

The exhibition is neither a retrospective, nor a presentation of the last works of the Portuguese painter. It is a specific focus on the idea of use in Loureiro’s work since 2000. Not only the gesture of the painter in link with the materialization of the canvas or paper, but a representation of this use according to tangible forms. Effectively, Loureiro has always been obfuscating the boundaries between abstraction and figuration. Here, his shapes – squares, lines, spheres… – come to life through gravity and movement. They fall, cling, roll over, clash, and suspend themselves. It is a giant cycle that awakens before us. But by the touch of the paintbrush, these lines lose all materialization again, and become eroded, like palpitating luminous masses. The painting lights up and goes out before us. Rhythmically. Isotopic.