Veludo ricochete: Paulo Whitaker

Albuquerque Contemporânea will inaugurate, on June 16th, the exhibition "Veludo Ricochete" (Velvet Ricochet), a solo show by Paulo Whitaker, bringing together a collection of 16 works, presented to the public for the first time. The exhibition comprises thirteen oil paintings on canvas and three charcoal and synthetic enamel drawings, recently produced by the artist.

Borrowing the title from one of the exhibited works, "Velvet Ricochet" highlights central aspects of the research developed by Whitaker over more than three decades. In his works, recurring forms emerge and reappear in different configurations, establishing relationships of approximation, overlapping, displacement, and transformation. Between permanence and deviation, the artist constructs his own visual vocabulary, continuously rearticulated through variations in scale, color, texture, and gesture.

The works gathered in the exhibition reveal a process that combines constructive rigor and openness to chance. Masks, molds, and cutouts used by the artist over the years function as instruments for creating a constantly evolving formal repertoire, in which precise decisions coexist with accidents, interruptions, and unexpected encounters between materials and colors.

In the critical text accompanying the exhibition, curator and researcher Tálisson Melo proposes a reading of Whitaker's work based on the idea of ​​play. For the author, the forms that traverse the artist's trajectory can be understood as pieces of a game without conclusion, in which each work constitutes an autonomous universe and, at the same time, integrates a broader system of relationships, recombinations, and recurrences. From this perspective, painting appears as a dynamic field of absorptions and ricochets, where each gesture reverberates and transforms the whole.

In Velvet Ricochet, Paulo Whitaker presents a set of works that reaffirms the vitality of his pictorial research, marked by the capacity to continuously reinvent his own elements and expand the possibilities of painting as a space for experimentation.