João Queiroz

As so many other painters, João Queiroz found in aquarelle a visual freedom and a performative speed not permitted by either oil or acrylic. The vigour and vivacity afforded by this technique adapts almost organically to the artist's pictorial evolution and to his intent of transposing to paper not the descriptive or analytic instant of a landscape exercise, but rather the aesthetic fruit of his sensorial experience of nature – with no interest whatsoever in lines or geometrical and geographical forms.

Taking profit from the aqueous constitution of aquarelle, Queiroz reworks his perception of the natural world by diluting the strident luminosity and the vibration of colours within a disordered surface, in the apparent chaos of a living organism visually created to pulse with the same primordial energy which the painter finds in nature. However, despite the gestualist and abstract outlook of this aquarelle, the glorious and dismal movements of the dim blues dominate this non-narrative space in such a way that it seems to echo at a distance the epic composition Snow Storm: Hannibal and his Army Crossing the Alps (1812), a Romantic painting by J. M. W. Turner with identical spatial arrangement and rhythmic intensity.

AR

November 2011