Exhibition "Opalescent", by Antonio Malta Campos

The practice of Antonio Malta Campos Malta employs pictorial techniques that float in paints on canvases, papers, and assemblages. His brushstroke, sometimes incisive, other times gliding, also moves towards the subtle and graceful, in a recognizable stroke that transitions between figuration and abstraction. For Malta, painting begins in a small notebook, in watercolor sketches that will become canvases filled with color and form. His research follows the path that Matisse described as "construction through color," a plastic investigation of place, the creation and occupation of the sensible. His abstraction is suggestive, insinuating through different strokes and formats that there is a place of creation in the visual discomfort of geometric precisions and the distinctions between the abstract and the figurative. It is in this place that Malta dwells and is inhabited.

His poetic universe is an expansion of the pictorial operation, achieving an exquisite mastery of chromatic profusion. His compositions reveal gradations that are sometimes subtle, sometimes hyperbolic, floating in blues, neons, and earthy tones, creating a fictional universe from the contours, lines, and textures of the painting.

His poetic multiplicity becomes even more evident when we look at other works that show expressionist influence in color and drawing; these are paintings that he himself called "nervous paintings." This designation underscores the more tense, dynamic, and emotionally impactful nature of these works, where color and brushstroke act as vehicles for a more raw and immediate expressiveness, revealing the complexity and scope of the artist's artistic investigation.

Malta invites our gaze to interpret the landscape from other perspectives, reverberating from the material, in which more opalescent and ethereal nuances are noticeable. The most recent materiality is suggestive, different from other phases such as the heads and characters, in which the figuration was more poignant due to the saturated colors and expressionistic strokes.

In the exhibition “Opalescentin the gallery Simons of AssisiIn this exhibition, which brings together recent and previously unseen works by Antonio Malta Campos, we encounter a curatorial selection of his production that emerges from colors, lines, geometric forms, and abstract constructions. This production outlines paths in which the painting presents more open, cheerful color palettes, sometimes in pastel and soft tones, suggesting a lightness and a more serene atmosphere. These works explore color in its capacity to construct spaces and forms with softness. In the layered chromatic superimposition, there is a certain pearly luminescence, derived from opal, a gem that reflects multifaceted colors, emanating a milky and iridescent appearance in bluish, reddish, and orange finishes that change according to the angle of the light – Malta's technique is opalescent.

The semiotician Roland Barthes once summarized that "the contemporary is the untimely," that is, that which affects the present time to make it think about itself. Malta projects in his painting a profoundly untimely chromatic articulation: his composition operates under a provocative perspective. By establishing a temporality that escapes the immediate, his colors and gestures challenge the spirit of the age, opening up cracks for other ways of seeing and inhabiting the present.

Malta's pictorial work is a chromatic articulation in a two-dimensional field, demonstrating the skillful gesture of reinvention in the studio experience, the investigative process of color stacking, and the formal research that evokes new prisms of meaning from an already recognized and strengthened poetics. In the exhibition, we witness the synthesis of his poetics, a plastic essay that bursts into the exhibition space and reveals unique vectors of meaning.

Luana Rosiello and Mariane Beline

Service
Exhibition Opalescent
From January 15th to February 07th
Monday to Friday, from 10 am to 19 pm, Saturdays, from 11 am to 17 pm