« The disquieting strangeness often and easily surprises us whenever the boundaries between imagination and reality are blurred, when what we had thought fantastic offers itself to us as real. »
The disturbing strangeness – Sigmund Freud
I’m fascinated by the seemingly unreal in the everyday.
All those moments when we lose ourselves staring at a detail that attracts us without ever really knowing why, are the anchor points I used to begin this series of paintings.
I’ve tried to approach these pauses as events. Encounters that could take place with the living, but also with oneself.
That’s why I named this series of paintings “Specimens”.
More often than not, I draw motifs from the real world and then process them in paint, using my memory in conjunction with the information gathered (fragments of photographed images, details of the materiality of a surface). I don’t use a direct image, but a mixture of several details that have attracted me, just as I might write something fragmented that organizes itself.
More precisely, my research into representation in painting addresses the truth of images, notably the suggestive potential of figures that could induce other meanings in the composition.
I also tell my plastic story in the way I treat events in painting, to give presence to new forms and meaning to the image.
I then try to let the paint surprise me by organizing my backgrounds in a random way by spraying paint.
In my various pictorial endeavors, I now try to keep things as simple as possible, welcoming accidents.
I don’t draw beforehand on paper, preferring to start directly on canvas, and I paint several pictures at the same time in successive layers.
I add gestures of spray paint, scratch, wash, erase and start again. Like bouncing, it’s this back-and-forth that interests me in the construction of a painting.
At first, I control my painting, but at the same time, the painting ends up controlling me, and this balance interests me in the elaboration of a work.
In search of a balance between a vaporous, almost painted background and the density of a meaningful motif, I paint until I obtain a result that matches the event I want to share in my paintings.
I work to provoke arbitrary comparisons and associations that break down hierarchies between the visible and the invisible, figuration and abstraction. I seek to bog down our capacity for recognition in a loss and surplus of meaning, in order to arouse doubts and questions about the events unfolding in the work, rather than certainties in the viewer’s mind.
David Antono Loureiro
Series of paintings realized in 2022/2023
