Untitled (8104)

Vítor Pomar (b. 1949, Lisbon) 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. His work emerges from reuniting seemingly dispersed knowledge 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.

Part of a group of works executed during Pomar’s stay in New York during the early 1980’s, these paintings bear a strong relation to the spectator’s body. Although abstract, the work is based on a ritualistic practice of repetition. Using mask “chaches”, as Pomar call 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. The work can be perceived as symbols of depth or vast fields of mobility, determined by fields of space and superimposition.

Untitled (8104) has been exhibited at My Own Battlefield, Museu de Serralves, Oporto, Portugal, 2003 and reproduced on the catalogue “Vítor Pomar: My Own Battlefield”, p. 145, ASA Edições and Museu de Serralves, Oporto, Portugal, 2003.