Untitled

Vítor Pomar has been a prominent figure in the Portuguese art context since the 1970s. His conceptual approach bears the influence of Buddhism, specifically Buddhist meditation and the spiritual at large. Although rooted in the medium of painting, the work of Vítor Pomar brings together a multitude of artistic approaches, crossing painting with the experience of drawing, photography, and film. His work emerges from reuniting seemingly dispersed experience inscribe in daily life, which through a diary-like method, based on fragmentation, observation, and creation of images, captures the artist’s interest in the conceptualization of ideas connected with the subject of absolute existence. By the immediacy of his paintings’ pictorial gesture, Pomar questions our relation, understanding, and experience of time, place, and being.

Painted during his stay in New York, the scale of Untitled (1981) bears a relation to the spectator’s body. Although abstract, his paintings are based on a ritualistic practice of repetition. Using mask “chaches”, as he calls these, in this case, a sheet of newspapers, Pomar conceals parts of the canvas throughout the painting process, enhancing thus the spatial character of the work through the positive mark of the object and the empty space, which is left behind, once removed. His paintings can be perceived as symbols of depth, or as vast fields of mobility, determined by fields of space and superimposition.