While painting constitutes Pires Vieira’s main body of reference, his art integrates the joint potential of other disciplines, inserting itself into an area of exploration open to the premises of the materiality and three-dimensionality of sculpture and the spatialisation of installation. These coordinates are particularly visible in the first section of the exhibition, composed of a set of pieces that reinforce the physical, objectual presence of the painting and that, instead of presenting a single object, constitute a community of elements. Using processes of accumulation and overlapping of paintings and readymade objects, the pieces are combinatory interventions whose parts establish dialogical relationships. Series of works such as Sem título (2018–19) demonstrate how painting is liberated from its natural space of suspension, placed on the floor or propped up against the wall, arranged in an interactive way with other works and various objects of an extraartistic nature. A thick, textured oil painting of expressionist plasticity is reconciled with industrially produced materials, which refer both to the domestic sphere and civil construction, and to various aesthetic values and uses: household appliances, industrial palettes, stepladders, shovels, and bags of charcoal. They are concrete signs of an as yet undefined universe, a speculative complement to the work, that deny it the conclusion of the process and definition of meaning. Pires Vieira collects, selects, accumulates, arranges, and combines objects on the floor, forming a non-hierarchical compositional game of elements of a diverse nature, exploring possibilities of articulation of meaning based on the physical characteristics of the materials used—their volumes and scales—and on the dialogue with the surrounding space. In this sense, his work involves the concept of display as a way of highlighting the objects, increasing awareness of the act of presentation. The result of this exercise of assembly is the creation of organic, informal, provisional, precarious compositions of elements that evoke processes of storage—in which the exhibited paintings, standing out from the wall, do not obey a conventional or solemn presentation. Hence, what is highlighted in these works is neither the act of painting nor the objectual presence of painting. Rather, its mode of action and operation incorporates a dimension of performativity in the artistic practice of the author. This dimension, inherent to the artist’s processes of assembly and installation in the space, is also—together with the conceptualisation and appropriation of references—an expansion of the effect of the work that prolongs its appreciation: it proves to never just be a passing visit and conference, as it also is an enduring projection and resonance, thus contributing to the sensation of an experience of long linkages rather than a trajectory of successive hermetic revelations.

As inúmeras possibilidades da pintura, Sandra Vieira Jürgens