Paulo Whitaker (São Paulo, 1958). Lives and works in São Paulo.
Paulo Whitaker's work is consciously inserted in the tradition of modernist painting, that is, in the Greenburgian sense of a painting that takes its ontological characteristics (the flat surface, the form of support, the paint properties) as positive factors, fundamental elements of the picture-making itself, and as the inevitable starting point of the constuction of each painting. In fact, and in addition to some rather obvious formal changes that mark the clearly distinct phases of his career, these premisses have guided Paulo Whitaker’s production since the start, justifying and critically underlying his studies and experiments. While in the early 1990s (that is, the start of the period which the artist considers as his mature stage), few and considerably free features were set against stereo, almost colourless backgrounds, the artist gradually developed toward a more concrete artwork in which shapes constructed on pre-prepared templates are condensed against vibrant, monochrome backdrops. At times, each shape is enclosed within a smaller compartment, a formal strategy that grants complexity to the iconography, reinforcing the feeling that the soul of the painting resides, deep down, in the harmony with which distinct formal solutions interact within the general coordinates and universal parameters defined by the artist: despite the differences, the work progresses without a solution of continuity.
Paulo Whitaker's work is consciously inserted in the tradition of modernist painting, that is, in the Greenburgian sense of a painting that takes its ontological characteristics (the flat surface, the form of support, the paint properties) as positive factors, fundamental elements of the picture-making itself, and as the inevitable starting point of the constuction of each painting. In fact, and in addition to some rather obvious formal changes that mark the clearly distinct phases of his career, these premisses have guided Paulo Whitaker’s production since the start, justifying and critically underlying his studies and experiments. While in the early 1990s (that is, the start of the period which the artist considers as his mature stage), few and considerably free features were set against stereo, almost colourless backgrounds, the artist gradually developed toward a more concrete artwork in which shapes constructed on pre-prepared templates are condensed against vibrant, monochrome backdrops. At times, each shape is enclosed within a smaller compartment, a formal strategy that grants complexity to the iconography, reinforcing the feeling that the soul of the painting resides, deep down, in the harmony with which distinct formal solutions interact within the general coordinates and universal parameters defined by the artist: despite the differences, the work progresses without a solution of continuity.
