Time for Everything and vice-versa
15.05.2021
26.06.2021

Time for Everything and vice-versa suggests the terms for understanding what is going on here. These are not “laws”, but a movement that is intrinsic to the works and to the way of seeing them: a sense of time that is, in its most concrete dimension, out of time. Because time, here, is liquid, it escapes any kind of containment, determination, date. Time flows between paintings and – with it – their subjects, gestures and stains, certain elements. In the work of Jorge Queiroz (Lisbon, 1966), the story is told within the game with that movement which knows that, by nature, nothing stops and everything escapes the clear memory of the primitive contact with things. The entire movement of the work is, thus, made of rescuing the impressions that are already glued to the artist’s eyes and skin, by the measure of his own existence. Each decision establishes – more or less predictably – relations between the elements or gestures that constitute the works, according to the resolution of the narrative that the artist pursues in the construction of the image; it is a constant initiation that requires the imaginative revisitation of himself, entirely and at once. For this reason, among the works that make up Queiroz’s work, we recognize some common elements – such as stains, gestures or figures, more or less concrete – that seem to repeat themselves; however, they do not only re-emerge but also establish themselves in a renewed appearance, with another way of existing and being, differently understood by the artist who creates them and also by us, when we look at his drawings or paintings. We could say that the artist’s plastic universe has a certain autonomy towards the concrete work; it hovers over the works and, finally, rests on them, singling them into the unity in which they are part of.

On that note, the seven pieces that constitute the exhibition are the continuation of a work process that can not be separated, that is, all these pieces are part of a continuous movement of a relationship with the world and with painting, and they testify the mutations of what happens in them, as this process progresses or proceeds within an endless movement. As in the entire artist’s body of work, they leave from the excessive determination of time to reach a redemptive and broader space where the senses and readings made so far are surpassed. They open, they do not close. And, although they end, as a work that is shown, they are never closed, they do not close a totality, even when limited by the end of the canvas or the frame. On the contrary, they embrace each other to offer themselves – maintaining unity as the backdrop – singularly to the plunge and the subjective reunion of those who observe them with their own gaze and feeling, even if only from what they expose; they are doorways to the inside out, and that is the measure of their opening. There, the fusion begins again, the metamorphosis of everything that, in a certain way, moves over and over again. Therefore, the added text is clear: Modo, Mondo, Momento, Eclipse, Tempo para Tudo e vice-versa (Time for Everything and vice-versa); a wide “no-time” – or the pure rearrangement – in each and for all of them.

Maria Joana Vilela