Exhibition "While Becoming", by Thales Pomb

Landscapes with horizons and formations that appear to be vegetation, possibly geological. Interior and exterior scenes of human and animal interactions. Screens veiled by frames and boxes, scenes revealed between theatrical frames—these are some of the main motifs that appear in the recent production of Thales PombHis paintings, drawings, and sculptures produce images that cannot be easily associated with reality. By confronting the tension between color and form in pictorial construction, these works subvert figuration to favor gesture. The figures, scenes, and landscapes become metaphysical means for the contemplation of the imagination.

By summarily assembling and disassembling space-time, the fields of diffuse colors in the paintings evoke rare lights, like the oblique luminosity that envelops the surroundings of sunrise and sunset, especially in nature. These lights traverse space in a short time and, despite—or because of—this, deposit moments of suspension, in which everything is about to be revealed or concealed, everything seems poised to transform. The contrasts and chromatic gradations schematize phases of a fragmented light, structuring the space-time of a perpetual gerund, in which there is only the possible infinity of the moment as it unfolds.

In Thales Pomb's recent paintings, scenes are frequently constructed in series, such as the series of installers, the series of cats outdoors, and the series of proscenium arches. In the first, the images mobilize art installers between liminal forms and spaces, alluding to the mysterious dynamics of the art world itself: the circulation of works, their controlled entry and exit from spaces. The content of these works is a veiled but indifferent fact—the frames, boxes, and packaging integrate with the rhythm of the color fields nuanced between light and shadow, of the horizontals and diagonals that suggest possible horizons and depths, structuring time and space. The movements of the boxes and these veiled works do not generate suspicion under the sunlight: they naturally traverse the planes where this light stretches, as if arriving or preparing to depart. The titles of these paintings allude to dance and the choreography of precise movements: dancing, tango, little step, little adjustment, bolero, and little pull. The potential for liberation in these actions lies in the tension between colors and forms, which, by metaphysically depositing time in pictorial space, uses figuration to gesture the poetics of an enigma.

In his paintings on canvas, Thales Pomb works with a process of "burning," applying intense layers of warm tones to the canvas from which the formal immanence of his images emerges. In his Conté pencil drawings on Ingres paper, the artist establishes another immanence, founded on the white of the paper—the material "background" of these images. The stains and marks in shades of gray and black produced by the Conté pencil pay homage to the effects of light and shadow in the drawings of Georges Seurat (1859–1891), also making use of the texture of the Ingres paper to suggest backlit masses. In these drawings, the density of the darker forms relates to empty—or softly constituted—fields, producing the same suspending effect present in the paintings.

Thales Pomb's recent work, creating images from color and form, proposes a reflection on the contemporary difficulty of "being present": contemplating the moment requires the ability to inhabit the unsettling. This does not mean succumbing to sensory overstimulation, but seeking that which does not yet conform to the image of reality. Reflecting on the practical philosophy of our time, Vladimir Safatle proposes that, faced with the worsening crises and the urgency of confronting reality, it would be necessary to "let the fragments of experience speak, to be exposed at the initial point where they collide with thought." Safatle suggests that the sublime, like other concepts, is subject to the contemporary obsession with security, the reason for the general intolerance of collision and rupture. The sublime, however, "as an indeterminate concept of reason," is linked to experiences that make the imagination confront its own limits, formalizing precisely "that which does not submit to the form of representation." If historically the sublime resided in the feeling of smallness or terror in the face of the totality imposed by nature, in contemporary times the sublime lies precisely in the feeling of fragmentation that a world in crisis produces.

This fragmentation is reflected in Thales Pomb's painting, where each color field can be seen individually or separately, creating and undoing the uniqueness of the image. Thales reflected in his studio: “Before, I already knew the image I wanted from the beginning. Now, I don't know what I'm going to paint. I pay to see.” Instead of a design dependency that ensures the image even before it exists, his paintings and drawings confront the spatio-temporal experience of the moment, without the pretension of knowing it as a definition. Only with the awareness that the pictorial gesture is capable of giving form to sublime liminality and transforming each instant into a moment of contemplation.

Gabriela Gotoda – curator

Service
Exhibition While it becomes
From February 28th to April 13th
Monday to Friday, from 10am to 19pm; Saturday, from 10am to 15pm