Jorge Queiroz: Recent works

Galerie Nathalie Obadia is pleased to organize Jorge Queiroz's second solo exhibition with a set of recent works made in Berlin and Paris where he is currently in residence at the Centre International d'accueil et d'échanges des Récollets.  
Parallel to this event, an important solo exhibition is taking place at the Museu Serralves in Porto until July 1, 2007 (catalog) and Jorge Queiroz will participate in the exhibition "Where? Scenes from the South: Spain, Italy, Portugal" which takes place this summer at the Carré d'Art in Nîmes.
His large works on paper were first noticed in 2003 at the Venice Biennale in the exhibition "Clandestine" (curator Francesco Bonami). A year later, he exhibited at the Sao Paulo Biennial, a set of large drawings (from his first exhibition at the gallery organized in 2004)
Jorge Queiroz's works could be described as "a whole world", a world in which characters, landscapes, constructions, motifs and references are articulated to suggest stories that lead the viewer to images that can never be completely deciphered, as if they could not be fully told. These works with surrealist and symbolist accents have a very poetic writing where paint, pastel, charcoal, watercolor, grease pencil intermingle and dilute.
Each drawing appears as fragments of a story where the lines and compositions always leave room for a networked image where the recognizable and the indefinable, the narrative and the abstract, which make the magic of the works of Jorge Queiroz. We are jostled in the same drawing by easily identifiable details confronted with others that remain more mysterious. The universe of Jorge Queiroz takes shape as a complex imaginary where characters and situations bring a constant ambivalence between reality and fantasy and present a constant challenge to the interpretation and construction of a coherent discourse.
In this universe, drawing is neither an autobiographical practice, nor the simple extension of the artist's sketches and thoughts. It is all of this at once and the work takes on all its originality with the confrontation of techniques and the occupation of space which can be saturated in certain places or left blank in others.
Even if he does not use the technique of glued paper or "exquisite corpses", the artist's practice can be considered as a metaphor for the free association of ideas and techniques found in psychoanalytical discourse and analysis. Jorge Queiroz's drawings resist description, and can only be translated by "his" own language, which is the predominance of the imaginary as a chain of meaning that Lacan talks about and that builds a language of his own. There is a code in the pictorial vocabulary of the artist but it is each time shaken by a mosaic of places, constructions, characters which make the image mysterious. One thinks of the paintings of Gaspar David Friedrich but also of the forests and characters of Alberto Giacometti and Wols and Max Ernst.
This singular "Cosmogony" seems to be built through an "architecture of episodes" using points of view and camera movements characteristic of the language of cinema, oscillating between "zooms" and distant shots.