Paulo Lobo: in the wind
Paulo Lobo’s work is determined to transform the traditional support of painting – chassis, canvas – into something that also breaks with its endemic frontality. Somewhat like Marcello Nitsche or Nelson Leirner in the 1960s, he discovered that this rupture, also associated with the passage from the modern to the contemporary, has a much less problematic and prosaic aspect when viewed out in the open – there where the fixity and calculated strokes of the brush, more or less successful, are seemingly torn apart by the wind.
Also a draftsman, he rehearses on “smaller” canvases, a superficial, subtle upheaval, which can refer both to the critical character of São Paulo’s production, such as the emulations of manual work in the academy, as to the production of artists such as Janaína Tschäpe or Cecile Brown, practically in the form of a tribute. He plays with notions of scale and style, while presenting us with the theme of politics from two instances that come together today, perhaps as never before. One, the saddest and most abject, is the covert murder of journalist Vladimir Herzog, a fact against which each of us is now obliged to take a stand. The other instance is the only way to deal with the country’s violence and singularities. Through it, we are displaced, in the capital of Brazilian public art, as spectators of a poetics sedimented by risk and play, simultaneously. Thus, instead of being paralyzed and powerless, this show produced and curated by the artist implies an ethical dimension based on the eminent need for participation. Such as the vote.
Paulo believes in signs and ephemeris, in moments of celebrating a spiritual achievement or a “great idea” that crossed his mind. There is figuration, certainly, without realism or engagement. Its articulations welcome a “congenial” primitivism, in the reluctance to embrace the structure given by the European or North American canon. It seems to ask, first of all, if the painting is really worth the nail that sustains it, as challenged by Antonio Dias.
This translates to something that sensitizes us physically and mentally and, at the same time, reveals in itself a crystalline perception of change. Under what conditions do fissures open up in the solid ground of languages such as literature, music, theater, painting, installation or video?
Paulo’s work agrees only with this chance to escape the opaque fatalism of the matter, the bet on a single solution, which ends up extinguishing the process, as in the unfortunate joke that lets us know “the operation was a success and the patient died”. He sustains himself by the hope of those who have already survived.
Rafael Vogt Maia Rosa, September 14, 22