Starting Line (Linha de Partida)
"Art 'now' is as real as an apple. […] and that is what converts it into a thing." Ferreira Gullar, 1957
In Bruno Neves' first solo exhibition, the painter's fidelity to the problems of art dealing with objective questions of form, color, and space is impressive. The young artist from São Paulo thinks plastically and pictorially with conscious rigor; by evoking a geometrizing synthesis, where color illuminates through overlap, Bruno builds pictorially tactile constructions.
This ‘tactility’, the painter explains, far from the hands, acts on the retina, confronting the observer in the depth of its dense chromatic surfaces. It is a visual experience built on the direct relationship between the eye and the pictorial plane, where a certain comfort can come from both structured composition and the relational softness between colors, even if the density of the pigment disturbs. The chromatic layers reveal themselves little by little, upon approach; as if the painting demanded time. In them, the gestures, sometimes contained, sometimes incisive, operate with a double function: while presenting the overlaps of color, they destabilize the geometries, creating zones of tension between compositional control and an admissible chance.
These gestures are not merely decorative or spontaneous; they are cuts and incisions that function as structuring marks. With greater or lesser precision, they indicate lines that cross the plane and inaugurate or close the painting itself. There is, in this procedure, an acute awareness of visual construction: each intervention carries the weight of a formal decision, and each line, even when fragmented, participates in the architecture of the planes.
And the artist seems indeed to have been formed by an experience in which sensitive values do not turn toward subjectivities, but rather toward the concrete demands of the gaze. His painting seeks neither introspection nor confession; it is built on the canvas, in the tension between visual elements, in the precision with which each plane is articulated. There is a refusal of expression as an outburst or as a narrative. What is seen is the result of a plastic intelligence that operates with rigor, where emotion is not imposed descriptively, for it infiltrates through formal organization into the observer’s gaze.
This apparent impersonality, far from coldness, is the wisdom of the hand that knows the weight of each form, the density of each color, and the impact of each line. And if, for the painter, painting does not lend itself to explanations or narratives, it should not submit to discursive logic. The painting is, above all, a singular construction of language and matters as an autonomous determination. The image, according to him, does not need to justify its existence with words, for it must sustain itself in the visual field, provoke the gaze, and establish a presence that is not resolved in explanations.
Indeed, the painting that Bruno defends is that which resists translation, which does not allow itself to be easily captured by foreign categories, but which, nevertheless, operates in the interval between the visible and the sensitive; and the absence of titles in most of his works is an index of this thought. However, if individualizing identifications waver, collective singularities are recognized, pointed out in the titles of the series that group directions. In this space, the plastic power of these works manifests: a silent articulation between elements that, together, produce vibration: a kind of displacement that strains perception.
Particularly distinct in the body of the thirteen works exhibited are Styx and Acheron (Estige e Aqueronte); which imposes itself visually in the hall. Dominated by a red mass that stands out in space, it suggests a symbolic and affective charge that transcends the pictorial plane. The title, rare in the artist's production, rather than providing an explanation, directs the questioning and points to a deliberate fissure in the logic of non-naming. In this choice, the rivers of Hades, evoked in the title, are not just mythological references, but rather indications of internal clashes, of the need to name the unspeakable and the confrontation of the gesture itself. Here, perhaps a metaphor for a personal crossing, for an intimate hell marked by anguish, self-questioning, and the refusal of pacification. And on the surface of Styx and Acheron (Estige e Aqueronte), this refusal is not limited only to the pictorial dimension, since it is a deposit of experience: a stratification of lived and tensioned time. Each applied layer incorporates sediments of a crossing that passes through the artist himself. The red, which prevails in the composition, does not operate as a symbol, but as matter that insists and returns. A kind of body in formation, where each gesture is a record of an attempt, each overlap is a memory of a decision, and each plane is a trace of a permanence that seeks to be unstable. Compared to the other works on display, this painting asserts itself as a point of condensation where color and form present themselves, more directly, as lived time. And it is in this density, deliberate and restless, that his painting, in each of the series, finds power.
For the curator Gabriel San Martin, if in the series Glows (Fulgores) the artist “seems to friction against the limits imposed by their contours [those of the color fields]”, in Excavations (Escavações) the line acts forcefully in destabilizing these fields. In Palimpsest (Palimpsesto), as the title suggests, time is accumulation.
In fact, in Neves, time is not just a condition of execution but a constitutive matter. Each layer deposited on the canvas carries not only pigment but also duration and an accumulation of observation. The pictorial surface transforms into thickness, where geometrized fields emerge and recede, revealing a logic of construction that seeks sedimentation. And in this construction, there is no refusal of what has been imposed, but a deliberate incorporation of bases that reveal themselves little by little. Each pictorial stratum functions as memory and structure, as a practice that remains even when it is hidden. And in this accumulation, Bruno Neves' work asserts itself, vivid, not as a surface, but as a being of impregnated depth.
Starting Line (Linha de Partida)
Text critical
The premise is one: the match only begins after the rules of the game have been established. In a sense of ordering, Bruno Neves' works relentlessly reiterate the question regarding the problematic nature of painting. If painting involves a specific set of rules, these works seem, on one hand, to interrogate the way in which painting's relationship with drawing is established and, on the other, the possibility of painting's presence in the world. By Neves establishing, after all, the limits of the entire field of action of color through the line, drawing radiates as a conditioning factor of the works and, at the same time, as a resource that ensures the de-virtualized presence of the planar surface in the world.
By all accounts, Neves' production turns toward a certain will for order. Straining two-dimensional limits—whether through the thickness of layers or through incisions on the surface—the works simultaneously conquer the plane. Gathering three of the artist’s series in this exhibition – Fulgores (Glows), Escavações (Excavations), and the most recent, Palimpsesto (Palimpsest) – all are involved in a kind of internal tension with painting and drawing as a common denominator. By fundamentally understanding painting as color and surface, the works seem keen on ridding themselves of the definitions of the line. However, as they form contours in space, they repeatedly realize they are determined by it.
The color fields of the series Fulgores (Glows) seem to friction against the limits imposed by their contours. Poorly accommodated in the wake of a certain will for expansion, they are invariably sealed by the boundaries of where each color can exist. Prevented, therefore, from experiencing varied positions in the world, they experience life within a calculated limit. And, by ensuring a type of atmospheric spatial tension, these colors seem more and more skeptical of their own essence—and, with the shyness of their lowered tones, gradually exhausted of belief in their own power of appearance.
In the case of Escavações (Excavations), in turn, a formless architecture takes shape, embedded in its own failure. The gravitational formation of the drawing, which pulls everything downward, merges with incisions, as a sort of free transit between these resources. As if a lack of interest in reality guaranteed the easy interchangeability of everything under the shadow of an experience that becomes synonymous with helplessness, its entire supporting base seems ready to yield to the weight of the days. The fact here is that everything built seems to live on the verge of disappearing. Familiar with such a fleeting reality—ranging from the lack of concern in choosing to demolish a historic building to construct a commercial one, to the irreverent ephemerality of any concrete fact—these structures seem built already prepared to be torn down.
In the works of the series Palimpsesto (Palimpsest), layers of pictorial time accumulate and reveal themselves through the artist's physical action on the matter. In a tension between plane and depth that problematizes the very notion of a planar surface, the austere geometry, divided into compartments evoking architectural structures, establishes a dialogue with the Brazilian constructive tradition (tradição construtiva brasileira), yet conditioned by the materiality of physical interventions on the surface. In what seems to function as a synthesis of the two previous series, here the line becomes absence. Whether through fissures or the survival of the line behind the paint that overlaps it, the contour here is built through the removal of adjacent layers. And, led to be an absence of volume while volume is granted existence under the norms of the line, each work seems to depend on the renewed exercise of resolving its dilemmas as they themselves become clear. As if embedded in the structure of the paintings, the line once again reiterates its logical interiority that governs the coexistence of color.
In one work from the series, an underlying layer of reddish color is revealed by an incision into the previous grayish layer, making visible the existence of volume through thickness; but, to the extent that the color itself reflects more light, it ends up illuminating more than the front layer. With this, the red ends up emptying the volume's capacity to create shadow, de-virtualizing the plane precisely to make this three-dimensionality virtualized. And given, then, that the underlying color is produced by the very action that makes it visible, the paintings reinvent physical scale through thickness without losing their compositional character as a planar surface.
If materializing painting, therefore, consists of virtualizing the resources that place it in literal space for the sake of planar logic, the constitutive conditions of thickness bet on their own emptying. The fact is that Neves' painting lives off the interest in creating an exception to reinforce the rule. And, in this nature of inescapable order, the artist experiments in the gap between adherence to and non-compliance with the given norms—but, to do this well, he remembers it is nothing less than fundamental to have a profound awareness of the structures that govern the medium.
By abandoning planar order, it ends up proving that there is still much to be explored in these rules; just as, in the sum of strategies for approaching the plane, its demand for an expanded link with reality is laid bare. It seems that, in the equation of this geometry, a sense of autonomy resists, parallel to a certain will for life. And if the smooth tactility of the canvases finds an aversion to the texture implied by the desire to make the plane an increasingly artificialized structure, it, on the other hand, always ends up repositioned to negotiate with the world in order to become duly capable of confronting it—as if, to engage in metaphysics, it were first necessary to know the limit of how far the world can go.