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Paulo Monteiro
Sculpting Drawings
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Mendes Wood DM is pleased to present a selection of new works on paper and canvas contextualized with the sculptural works by the Brazilian artist Paulo Monteiro. This online exhibition brings together works made by the artist in the first months of this year. The works traverse concepts of space and color that have been explored by seminal artists in the recent history of Brazilian painting. While referencing his own initial studies on the shape of the void in painting, Monteiro’s new works explore his relationship with painting through drawing and sculpture, composing colors not commonly found in his earlier works and defying the limits of medium to found the common ground of his language.
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Continuously exploring the margins and limits of shape, Monteiro utilizes negative space as a medium in order to make his paintings feel like sculptures and his sculptures feel like paintings. His palette oscillates between cold and warm tones, dark blues, and a variety of reds that powerfully create an interlocking depth and stark contrast. This "radical plasticity" concerning the viewer has led Monteiro to make his "constellations"- configurations of his paintings and sculptures, which deal with the physicality of the object concerning the artist and viewer, much like one of Willys de Castro's Active Objects. It is through the careful positioning of the negative space that these "constellations" take on form. Monteiro also achieves this through his sculptures formed by the negative imprint of his hand and fingers molded in clay and later cast in bronze or lead. Here we present a seminal work of the artist from 1996, which explores a line cutting the dimensionality and a recent sculpture bounding his visions about painting and sculpture.
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I look at the canvas, and it’s not inert, it’s active, moving and living. Why I need this kind of miracle, l don’t know it, but I need it. My conviction is that this is the act of creation to me.
– Paulo Monteiro
In the ordinary use of language, when we employ the word polarity, we usually refer to two concepts diametrically opposed to each other. In one way or another, these concepts are not in harmony and can generate conflicts and even estrangement. In science, on the other hand, polarities are associated with the capacity that each chemical bond has for attracting electrical charges and, consequently, accumulating them. To think of distinct poles is to automatically relate them to negative and positive qualities and, therefore, a high potential for repelling one another. Still, these two ends can be complementary, like two sides of the same coin.
For a long time paper works were understood as being studies for a final work on canvas. This, however, contradicts Monteiro’s practice, which dilutes this polarization and explores the same diversity of colors, possibilities and pictorial construction both on paper and on canvas.
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In addition to this series of drawings, Monteiro worked on new paintings, which corroborate the idea that the medium in the artist's work is flexible, while his formal language remains precisely identifiable across painting, sculpture and works on paper. Furthermore, these new works carry an acidity of color that is rarely seen in Monteiro's most recent works, providing a sharp contrast to the essential minimalism of the artist's gesture.
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The vast series of drawings in graphite begun in the late 1980s, for instance, enhances the immanence of the black line upon white paper in unique trajectories that often surpass the limit of the support. In these works, there is no focus on narrative or representation although the hand trained to draw comic book stories during adolescence insisted on producing forms that occasionally suggest fragments of bodies.
– Kiki Mazzucchelli on Paulo Monteiro’s work,
published on Monteiro’s book The inside of distance, 2015
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Paulo Monteiro (1961, São Paulo, Brazil) lives and works in São Paulo.
Monteiro began working as an artist in 1977, drawing comic strips in a style influenced by cartoonists such as Robert Crumb and George McManus and the renowned Brazilian caricaturist Luiz Sá. Between 1983 and 1985, he was an integral part of the group Casa 7 alongside Carlito Carvalhosa, Fábio Miguez, Nuno Ramos, and Rodrigo Andrade. Together these artists participated in exhibitions at MAC – São Paulo, MAM-RJ and the 18th São Paulo Biennial in 1985, bringing Neo-Expressionism to the forefront of the São Paulo art scene. In the late 1980s and the early 2000s, Monteiro immersed himself in his sculptural practice. His return to painting over a decade ago brought a new level of consciousness to his work.
His works have been featured prominently in exhibitions such as The Empty Side, Zeno X, Antwerp (2018); Coleção MAC Niterói: arte contemporânea no Brasil, MAC Niterói, Rio de Janeiro (2017); The outside of distance, MISAKO & ROSEN and Tomio Koyama Gallery, Tokyo (2017); Building Material: Process And Form In Brazilian Art, Hauser & Wirth, Los Angeles (2017); The inside of distance, Office Baroque, Brussels (2016); The inside of distance, Mendes Wood DM, São Paulo (2015); Casa 7, Pivô, São Paulo (2015); Paintings on Paper, David Zwirner, New York (2014); Where Were You, Lisson Gallery, London (2014); 22nd São Paulo Art Biennial (1994) and 18th São Paulo Art Biennial (1985).
His works are in numerous permanent collections, such as MoMA, Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, MAC São Paulo, MAM Rio de Janeiro, and Niterói Contemporary Art Museum.
