Paulo is a generous being—closer to a child who offers candy to a stranger than to an older man walking through the halls of an Art Biennial, or drinking a vitamin smoothie from a street kiosk in São Paulo with fresh paint still on his fingers. He advises artists not to pose for photographs with their fist on their chin, nor to speak about Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception in interviews. A lover of tennis as well as surfing, he detests Brazilian popular music; his thinking aligns more naturally with hip hop or the so-called new musical genres than with sonic notes that can be foreseen or guessed—what Pierre Boulez called “expected notes.”
Paulo is a man who paints. Everything could be summed up there. But what he paints does not summarize anything. It seems difficult to orient oneself when looking at his work, which systematically denies values inherent to traditional painting: chromatic harmony or the purity of the stroke.
I get the impression that when Paulo paints, he is not the adversary of his own works—though I believe that perception is mistaken. Nothing in his paintings or drawings is arbitrary, since one senses the struggle between him and the pictorial space. Yet it also feels as if there is an agreement between the forms and his intentions—as though what they seek is not a settling of accounts but a deliberate misalignment. Dirty painting, stained surfaces, unforeseen chromatic combinations, textures that scrape the gaze, forms that feel like fragments of a social and personal world shattered to pieces. But is this misalignment a settling of accounts against color and form? Against the traditional way of approaching the pictorial world? Against the clean, firm stroke?
Boris Groys, the Russian theorist and critic, underscores the importance of what he calls “the weak gesture” to speak about the transitory nature of an art that can no longer assert anything solid about the world.
It is from that gesture that Paulo speaks to us. He covers our eyes and, by doing so, un-covers another way of seeing. To feel with the ear, to orient ourselves in space through sound, silence, and form. Color as thought; hybrid, pulsating form. A form that waits—a form that lives in chaotic gestures arranged with meticulous care: scratches, dense colors, fingerprints, shapes that vibrate like the drawings we left floating in childhood, only to rediscover their tireless relevance.
His painting is our childhood gifted back to our own time, as fluid and dispersed as our own contingency.
Luis González Palma, 2021