Paulo Lobo’s production is realized under a precise work program. The primary link between his projects is time. There is in his work a slowness inherent to painting. The duration of the material experience and the intempestivity of painting in the 21st century are indices of the philosophy of Bergson, Deleuze, and Nietzsche. The discourse of the material sign of painting, applied to wooden trunks, simulates being from the factory of sculpture. The pictorial act shifts to history, to the grandeur of myths, and the depth of memory in an arc between psychoanalysis and philosophy. Painting is an anatomical fact that Lobo converts into facts of nature like storms and winds. Through these meteorological allusions, the artist inflicts the harshness of time on the painted canvases: exposed to the open air for long months – they will be subjected to the relentless sun, heavy rains, and winds. What remains after months are shreds, lacerations, vestiges of faded colors, the anguish of seeing – or Oedipus and Jocasta, Sophocles, Foucault, Géricault, Cézanne, Herzog suicides, shipwrecks, and blindness. Paulo Lobo’s painting is a theogonic knowledge about desire, incest, pain, blindness, and death.

Lobo’s cultivated painting opens up political and pictorial discussions with the force of political education for democracy and the enhanced knowledge of art, understood as the production of specific knowledge about the sense of vision. Paulo Lobo is an artist who employs orthodox materials such as oil paint in his painting and heterodox materials such as aged wood painted in his picto-sculptures. This classical and experimental use of the material signs of art broadens the possibilities of understanding the expansion of contemporary art. Moreover, it is a significant adherence of Lobo to art as a materialist vision. Lobo’s imagery to be published refers to the universe of classical Greek myths (Oedipus and Jocasta, Michel Foucault and knowledge as power), to pictorial and historical facts (such as Giorgione’s The Tempest and Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa, Rodin, the Cobra group), hangings (Tiradentes, Callot and Cézanne, Strange Fruits, the death by torture of Wladimir Herzog), among others.