Art does not aim at achieving factual truth in its making, and even with the advent of powerfully technological devices for capturing reality one will never manage to efficiently apprehend or communicate the enormous subjective charge that accompanies all images. The non-material side of this reality will never be able to be transmitted through the increasing of the degree of veracity of pictures that are painted, drawn, photographed or filmed, or of the countless built and sculpted objects. The scope of our explanations would lead one to place the paintings and drawings brought together here in this exhibition as moments of fixing a reality that accepts not being able to deal with all the artistic solicitations that imagination requires in its impulse to discover new forms of overcoming and exalting the real. João Queiroz’s painting and drawing invents a reality that possesses an aesthetic dimension of its own, less committed and more free of the references from which come the natural elements that form it, giving rise to an almost invisibility on the space that it apparently wishes to capture.

In the direct confrontation between that which we identify as real and that which seems to be unreal to us, and more recently as virtual, there is, in our mediation among these three enormous blocks that can perceive a symbology centred on the painting and drawing, a totality that is difficult to dissociate in its real and non-real parts; true and false. This exhibition presents a set of paintings and drawings on paper with the central theme of landscapes, spaces built out of vegetable and geological elements, among others, and which have no more obvious relationship among them. These elements are painted one by one, disconnected from a formal continuity that would be expected from earthly geographies, with the whole set forming an image with approximations to the simultaneously suspended and somewhat atmospheric nature that surrounds it and transports it from the ground to the centre of the painting. In the paintings the compositions are made up using traditional methods, while in the drawings João Queiroz introduces the line by means of furrows cut into wax that has previously been spread over the surface of the paper. In the paintings there is a search for chromatic effects through the conjugation of colours and shapes that lead us into open spaces, with it being susceptible for easily recognisable natural environments to be brought into them; in the drawings, a monochrome quality highlights a set of procedures on the surface of the paper, providing a more material dimension to each of the works.

The painting emerges as a process of capturing the occasional and successively random deforming of reality, something that increases the possibilities of freeing our imagination in order to be able to act creatively on that we observe. In this manner we may consider ourselves to be an active part of the reality carried, which comes to us through the visual suggestions that each work transmits to us. We are the observers of a surface that we cannot abandon and that we are only able to look at coherently when we place ourselves on the outside, feeling it in a perspective that is exterior to us. They are landscapes that ask to be inhabited, so we should see them as the product of pure imagination, which is not an artifice in the sense that all the elements it presents may exist individually. We are therefore eternally on the outside of each work and we are simultaneously an integral part, which enjoys the privilege of perceiving its superb forms. We often confuse our apprehensions with the configurations and spectrums represented by João Queiroz, which seem to be more insinuated than built, and for that reason are unfinished in the main, leaving us in an excellent position to interpret them. In contrasting the paintings with the drawings and the shapes used in each of them, we may possibly see that there is a very intimate relationship between the two approaches: the painting and the drawing stand as the counterpoint to each other, the face and its reverse. While in the case of the paintings the forms are born out of the conjugation of the lines established by the colours and by the movement of unions among them, in the drawings one only sees the appearing of successive strokes or lines engraved in the wax, without there being a concern to establish any kind of chromatic game or combination of colours. If, through a process of projection onto canvas, we could superimpose the drawings and the paintings, we would perhaps obtain a third dimension given to us through a mixture of colours from one with the lines and edges of the others. The drawing could then be considered as a sort of skeleton or linear exploration that is then composed on another, more pictorial level through the use of colour.

This exhibition proposes a set of images that break with the principle of factuality, that acknowledge the need for death as the last of the orders of the aesthetics of representation. The fiction contained in the works exhibited breaks out from those so unreal spaces and contaminates everything around it, influencing and interfering with what surrounds us. Nothing has become different, nor become liable to be detected from the landscapes that are intended to be fixed and on which all the experiences lived out by the artist and by all those who observe them have apparently been based. In thinking we are establishing intense monologues with what we are seeing, mediating concordances and discordances; we are relativising and accepting the losses in the communications and in the transmission of the intuitions that we carry out, acknowledging differences between the face and the reverse, between words and facts, and between plastic artifices and the reality of the things that are the fundamental elements that support our lives. It was easy to envisage the future imagining a day when technology might free humanity from all of its existential weight, but present reality is increasingly inundated with information, and this apparently libertarian dream has been turning into an immense nightmare. Something has gone wrong in this process of capturing the real and then going on to imagine new future forms. In spite of everything, we believe that all imaginary forms connected to are solutions that are much more benign in their consequences that the problems of freedom announced by technological development.