For his first personal exhibition in Brussels, the Galerie Nathalie Obadia is delighted to be hosting a set of recent works by Jorge Queiroz (born in Lisbon in 1966, and living and working in Berlin since 2004).
His large works on paper attracted attention at the 50thVenice Biennale in 2003 (the collective exhibition 'Arsenale-Clandestine', curator Francesco Bonami), and then in 2004 at the Sao Paulo Biennale and in 2006at the BerlinBiennale, as well as in other international exhibitions.
Works by Jorge Queiroz are held by many museums, including the MOMa in NewYork, the SF MOMA in San Francisco, the Carré d'Art in Nîmes and the BarcelonaCaixa, as well as in some prestigious private international collections.
In his work, the artist explores a wide range of techniques linked to drawing - pencil, charcoal, soft lead pencil, ink or gouache - creating mysterious compositions of various networks assembled into secret harmonies.
Each work gives up its own extraordinary story, and even though the artist uses neither the gummed paper technique nor 'exquisite corpses', our thoughts turn to the surrealist spirits of George Bataille, Max Ernst, Alfred Kubin, Thierry de Cordier or James Joyce.
These worksare surprising tales which resist description, where the identifiable jostles the indefinable, shapes and figures emerge and vanish between empty and filled spaces, enigmatic visions which necessarily remain open to each observer's individual imagination.
Likewise in the canvas works, this teeming flood of interlinked mental images, with each work bound to the next by an abstract structure, couples astonishingly and almost paradoxically with the textures and colours, marrying material and light.
