Critics

Paulo Chaves
New paintings by Plínio Palhano

"My concern is the matter of painting", says Plínio Palhano about his present work, which comes after Flowers of Fire - a chromatic explosion in an abstractive line of the theme -, paintings exhibited in 1985 at the Olinda town hall.

In Painting-Matter - title of the exhibition that the Recifean artist opens at the Vicente do Rego Monteiro Gallery - what fundamentally changed if compared with Flowers of Fire is that now instead of doing works in which the subject-matter is just pretext to the exploration of his own uneasiness and creative energy, in a figuration based on fantasy and imagination, Palhano did his oil-paintings starting from his observations in situ of landscapes, human figures or photographs of the latter, making more explicit the figurative feature of his pictorial work.

In Painting-Matter there is a greater definition in the modeling of the shapes if compared to his earlier series of paintings. But the transfiguration of the visual reality through the artist´s poetical sense and the expressionist attachment of his language is still present.

"In painting I prefer the matter to the theme. A brushstroke: this is the thick dosage that illuminates deciding the picture, giving shape to a tiny abstraction." The observation is by the painter himself who, using brushes, spatulas, his own fingers, turns out a sensory painting, heir to Tachism and Informalism, chromatically vibrant, with different textures and a greater concentration of matter (paint) in certain parts.

Thematically diversified, Painting-Matter by Plínio Palhano (who has just won a prize at the Salão de Arte Contemporânea de Pernambuco/Versão 87), exhibited at the Vicente do Rego Monteiro Gallery, is composed of a still life, a self-portrait, scenes of carnival, outdoor markets and landscapes of Fernando de Noronha. The thematic diversification is, by the way, a novelty in an individual exhibition by Plínio Palhano, who previously (Landscapes of Our Lives or Parts of the Animal Body, for exemple) preferred to start from a full vision of a determinate subject-matter to individualize it in its details, the whole broken into every composition as chapters of the same story.

"The painting by Plínio Palhano is alive with a dramatic feeling" - wrote Montez Magno about the artist´s former work, a remark that holds true for the current display. For these paintings in oil, José Cláudio´s statement in Flower of Fire is also pertinent: "The present pictures reveal the painter´s most radical commitment to himself, as well as to his dramatic side influenced by Rembrandt, Van Gogh and Iberê Camargo, who are always present in his personality of painter."