The problem of landscape and its representation lies at the heart of these images. Instead of describing nature or of giving it a conventioned and topographical rendition, Queiroz deals with the fog of sensations and perceptions that the natural world awakes in him – he extracts his pictorial dividends solely guided by instinct and intuition, in a Romantic mission that came to inaugurate a less conceptual phase in the course of his work. And despite the subjectivity of that visual experience being hostile to interpretations, a souvenir of Japanese prints seems to hover around this image conception, with areas of flat and non-naturalist colours, in a diaphanous and shadowless stillness that, just like the ukiyo-e (“pictures of the floating world”) that used to be coloured by hand in orange and blue hues, only gives us an outline of the views where the colossus of Mount Fuji used to rise.

 

João Queiroz achieves a visual experience that has nothing of Modernist or doctrinaire, but relies on the apology that artistic image still holds a sovereign value in the era of the screen – re-empowering painting as a human thing, destitute of intellectual and historicist filters, so that the onlooker might commune with the artist. Thus, this work was born as extension of his prophecy in that same year of 1999: “if painting is depleted in a game of symbols and signs, in its repeated interpretation and reinterpretation, it will become a cultural object in the most mouldering and academic sense of the term, and no longer a fundamental part in the creation of new sensibilities and new ways of seeing.”*

 

*João Queiroz in Arte Ibérica, n.º 28, October 1999, p. 30.

 

AR