Over the past four decades, Paulo Pasta has quietly established himself as one of the most revered and consistently engaging contemporary painters of his native Brazil, demonstrating his mastery of form and color within the two-dimensional plane. Though highly abstract, Pasta’s paintings retain architectural references; one senses the artist constructs his elegant geometries of posts and beams with the purpose of heightening the subtle chromatic variations among them. Whether pale pinks, blues and yellows or more intense, saturated crimson, indigo and ochre, the colors of Pasta’s palettes vibrate and shift in relationship to each other, evoking powerful associations that resist any particular definition or meaning.
Light figures prominently in each work, slowly revealing the paintings through soft tonal gradations and imbuing them with a gentle but constant rhythm. Pasta’s paintings can feel as if they are making themselves in front of the viewer, in their own unhurried and deliberate fashion. At the same time, they never quite arrive at their destination, their colors and composition evolving almost imperceptibly with the passing hours of daylight. This temporal suspension acts to bring the viewer into the canvas and its empty, timeless spaces of contemplation; in this way, Pasta’s works reflect atmospheric or metaphysical landscapes more than any actual physical places.
Pasta has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Museu de Arte Sacra de São Paulo, Brazil; Simões de Assis Galeria de Arte, Curitiba, Brazil; Instituto Tomie Ohtake and Anexo Millan, São Paulo, Brazil; Galeria Carbono, São Paulo, Brazil; Palazzo Pamphilj, Rome, Italy; Galeria Millan, Anexo Millan and Museu Afro Brasil, São Paulo, Brazil; Sesc Belenzinho, São Paulo, Brazil; Fundação Iberê Camargo, Porto Alegre, Brazil; Centro Cultural Maria Antonia, São Paulo, Brazil; Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, Brazil; among others. He had his first solo exhibition in North America with David Nolan Gallery.
His work is featured in various collections, such as the Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, Brazil; Museum of Modern Art of São Paulo, Brazil; Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de la Universidad de São Paulo, Brazil; Museu Nacional de Belas Artes do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, New York, USA; and Kunsthalle Berlin, Germany, amongst others.
