Panorama
21.09.2024
09.11.2024

The works of Jorge Queiroz (Lisbon, 1966) multiply in the face of a vertigo of form that his lexicon revisits to potentiate a new beginning whenever the images meet with a dead end, as well as to elicit a new response from the blank, void space.

Panorama is traversed by a syncopated line in equilibrium, a distortion of the images that it reflects, and which somehow find their own pulsating silence there. While the paintings are screens (the focus of the gaze and the extension of the transforming image), each bridge of drawings and objects that punctuates them is a point of synthesis for the following one, thus perpetuating a sort of narrative fuse activated by the linear arrangement (that reveals the trace as an instrument of thought). In this practice it is not the uncanny plastic singularity that bestows a condition of evasion and pause upon the objects, it is rather the repetition of the gesture (akin to that of the drawings and paintings) over a non-bidimensional material. The paintings are tied by knots, a sort of oneiric locks, of material relationships turned into relationships of power and moments in which the randomness of a deliberate flow (endemic to the artist’s practice) is fully allowed.

Inhabited by liquid, spectral portals that are very close to pictorial abstraction (in which depth contrasts with the spatial proximity of matter, increasingly denser as it moves away), Queiroz’ paintings seem to simultaneously crumble and thicken as the gaze deconstructs them. Like the compromise between drawing and painting (a beacon for the formal organization of the images), the juxtaposition of references and styles – particularly the sporadic occurrence of figuration in the trace; the quasi-imperceptible chromatic multiplicity of the Romantic movement; or the sinuous, fin de siècle asymmetry – transforms the reading of any fleeting apparition into a pointless exercise of intellectual recognition of characters, symbols or scenes. In fact, these will always be present, either diluted in the surrounding density or apparent enough to be named.

The images are reborn in the echoes of their own eidetic memory, bringing an acoustic quality to a trace left by profound layers of spaces within a plane. Once again, there is a vectorial absence allowing only for the certainty of a continuity, of realizations existing only within the mental perimeter, whose undeniable glow can hardly be associated with facts, times or moments in the realm of the real. The image of a thinking brain[1].

Eva Mendes

[1] Jorge Queiroz, https://vimeo.com/560485188