The Galerie Nathalie Obadia is delighted to present Jorge Queiroz’s fourth solo exhibition in its Paris premises. It follows on from Scènes du monde flottant in 2009, in which works on paper were exclusively shown. O Caso, the solo exhibition at the Pavilhao Branco at the Museu da Cidade in Lisbon, at the beginning of 2015, provided an occasion to discover a first series of paintings which Queiroz intends pursuing in his Parisian exhibition.
Queiroz, who has accustomed us to his exploration of techniques related to drawing, here approaches the medium of painting head on. Nevertheless, with his fictional worlds, populated by unfinished characters with hybrid bodies, and strange objects disseminated in multiple, almost floating spaces, the artist continues to undermine the way we perceive things.
These organic formal evocations, enlivened by strong colours – oranges, purples, deep greens – conjure up the introspective nature of these parallel worlds, at the centre of the artist’s innermost thoughts. Each canvas is hence the occasion to plunge into a network of clashing scenes, creating narratives with secret meanings. Continuing on from his works on paper, Jorge Queiroz expresses the complete nature of his creations, and his intention to encourage us to explore his oeuvre between reality and imagination: ‘In this set of works, one influences the other, the way a work is perceived affects the one which follows it. An apparently abstract structure or a fictional scene is altered by a flow of mental images, one mixing with the other. These paintings are related to my drawings by the recurring tensions between reality and imagination / figuration and abstraction.’ This oeuvre in a surrealist, symbolism and abstract vein, with a dreamlike and fantastic character, confronts the recognisable and indefinable in an assemblage of perspectives, playing with density and emptiness, the figurative and the abstract.
In O caso do silencio, a pensive, complementary green bubble stands out against a deep, agitated swirl of orange and black; like an interstice to the artist’s thinking, the evocation of a pensive, curled up body multiplies the possibilities of interpretations, inviting the spectator to study this ‘peephole’ in the canvas more closely. Further along, in O caso do tempo para tudo, Queiroz employs the strong complementary nature of colours to create a powerful and gripping space, from which two characters stand out as though on a bridge, overhanging a lake animated by troubling forms and colours, contrasting with the serenity of a deep sky.
The use of this rich and intense palette reinforces the spectator’s impression of admiring a dream landscape, like something out of science fiction. The narratives that we are surprised to follow from one canvas to the next, sometimes as though looking at them through a magnifying glass, sometimes as though they overrun us, invite us on an immersive journey. Jorge Queiroz’s canvases mainly resist description. There is a code in the artist’s pictorial vocabulary, but it is shaken each time by a mosaic of places, constructions and characters that make the image mysterious and fascinating.
‘The exhibition space resembles a dynamic stage on which each artwork lives and creates relationships with other artworks. This context encourages the spectator to explore the multiplication of ideas, imaginary spaces and forms,’ he tells us.
