This work is part of the series Habitar [Inhabiting] that Pedro Gomes completed in 1996. This series reveals the artist’s interest in ideas of scale and distance, suggested through the aerial view of a housing complex and by the transformation of the photographic image which the artist uses as the basis for the drawing process. In addition to the spatial distance implied by the viewpoint, there is another distance, one which compels the observer to step back from the work since what seems to be the blurred and tonally inverted subject – the buildings and streets of a large city –, disintegrates the closer one gets. The image of the city thus breaks down into a physical network of multicoloured pen strokes.

 

The concept of Habitar or dwelling of the series title, could also surely be applied to the manual labour of compulsively drawing on paper, a metaphor for the act of occupying or populating the physical space of the support, a meticulous gesture which we find in other works by the artist, in which reference to specific objects, beings or spaces (interior or exterior), is eschewed in favour of a structure composed of lines, traces or points made with materials as diverse as acrylic, erasers or even burnt paper.

 

The idea of a network or tessitura occurs in many of Pedro Gomes’ works. This method of construction makes it possible to retain a certain ambiguity of meaning with respect to the images: the network fixes and contains the signs within a space yet, at the same time, its repetitive nature extinguishes the specific identity of these same signs.

 

 

AFC

 

February 2011