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The Other Painting

The works from the late 80s caused surprise at first. After all, after a long course of experiments dedicated to establish a subtle plastic discourse of refined chromatism and accurate sense of composition, the new works seemed to be in blunt opposition to the hallmarks of the artist because of their crudeness and dramatic charge. Not only because of the distance they maintain from painting notions - they are irregular constructions made of crumbled metal sheets (almost "anti-paintings" because of the absence of traces from paint or brushes) - but also because their sense of composition, especially when associated to the idea of geometry, disappears. Actually, there are only residues of organization over the surface, and they are made fragile by the apotheosis of masses of unformed matter.

If, in the other pieces, color had already gotten blended with texturized matter, in the new works with metal it practically disappeared, or, more properly, it is reduced to the gray from the metal. And while they still evoked a pictorial atmosphere, it was the physical aspect of the work that stood. The flair for aesthetic beauty remained, but it became cruder, almost only the handling of the materials, brushes being replaced by hammers and other such tools. If ambiguities between ordering and disordering (6) have always been a recurring theme in Fernando Velloso's work, the metal surfaces gave concreteness to the motif.
 
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