Velvet Ricochet
Paulo Whitaker
When Paulo Whitaker invited me to write for this solo exhibition, he already had a title in mind, drawn from one of the works selected for the show, one of his rare paintings that bears a title — Velvet Ricochet. Even before immersing myself in the body of works, I realized that my own body was responding in such a way that it would be inevitable to cast a tactile and proprioceptive “gaze” upon them, since the two words, both individually and in combination, sharpened these sensory layers before I had even seen the paintings.
For me, velvet immediately evokes a soft touch, a heavy drape, depth and density, the absorption and cushioning of impact; while ricochet refers to a change in trajectory caused by the collision of something in motion against a surface at a certain angle, multiplying directions beyond a single straight line — something also light, sudden, swift, fleeting. Faced with the conjunction of these seemingly contradictory experiences, I could not avoid immediate associations with the dynamics of billiard balls moving across a felt-covered table, the snaps of rougher or subtler collisions tracing paths between calculation, skill, accident, and chance.
From this synesthetic idea, I began to sense that approaching Paulo’s work as a game would be an intriguing way to share impressions of his painting as an event. I believe that his oeuvre pulses within this latent ambiguity, in the absorption of the gaze while simultaneously eliciting the perception of rebounds and deviations, variations and repetitions that merge, collide, drift apart, disappear, and reappear elsewhere. And why do these forms return, almost as figures, as symbols of a grammar? I believe it is because they are pieces in a game that never ends, one that establishes a space apart from the ordinary world.
The game table brings to mind three paintings that I consider fundamental to the history of the emergence of abstraction — all made in 1937, coincidentally or not: Le Jeu de Cartes by Maria Helena Vieira da Silva, with the vertigo of playing-card suits becoming autonomous forms and creating a virtual space; Überschach by Paul Klee, in which the forms and colors of both the pieces and the chessboard itself construct the imminence of movement; and Trente by Wassily Kandinsky, a grid in which the artist organizes the various forms of a vocabulary that he would continue to rearticulate throughout his production through recombination, configuring a kind of memory game in which correspondences emerge elsewhere in his paintings.
I do not know whether these artists are among Paulo’s formal references or whether he has ever seen these works, but there is a structural affinity with his practice: they generate a playful situation and point to the game as a mode of construction, a mode of knowledge through experimentation. At this point, I found a key for reading his work over at least three decades as scenes from a vast match in a game without resolution, whose principal rule is never to stop playing. The image of a billiard table with colored balls ricocheting becomes particularly evident when I look at photographs of his room at the 25th São Paulo Biennial in 2002, featuring large canvases in which stacked or chained circular forms repeat themselves in different compositional balances — at times even evoking a bowling strike with pins that can no longer remain standing. This persists in the recent works, from 2020 onward, although in them I also begin to find the card suits and other pieces invented through his own repetitions-with-variations of scale, color, texture, and precision.
With the masks, cutouts, and stencils that Paulo has employed for years in his painting process, it is as though he creates his own game board, the pieces, and the rules of a game that he himself may later choose to break in order to arrive at new combinations and keep the match in motion. We, too, can do this through the tactile gaze that his work compels, unfolding the scenes of the game into other trajectories of imagination — a kind of pact around the intertwined dynamics of absorption and deviation embedded in Velvet Ricochet, both in the work that bears this title and in the exhibition as a whole. In some cases, each work seems to stage within itself a constellation of other paintings (whether already existing outside it, in the world, or in imagination, in the fiction materialized by this game), each with different treatments of the pictorial gesture.
If the critical reception of Paulo Whitaker’s work has often described his forms as a vocabulary in constant transformation, operating through a stratigraphic or palimpsestic logic, perhaps it is now possible to think of them as pieces in a game. This highlights how each canvas creates a small autonomous universe, while also revealing the artist’s interest in that which escapes control over the course of accumulated decisions: the unexpected encounter between colors, unforeseen superimpositions, interruptions of gesture, and the persistence of accidents — drips, stains, smudges, voids. What traverses his trajectory, beyond the recurrence of certain figures that gradually compose his archive through residues as well, incorporating accidents into his grammatical memory, is the persistence of a match that has spent decades reinventing its own combinations, between new dynamics and returning ghosts.
In the game proposed by Whitaker’s painting, no one wins and no one loses, for possibilities and relationships are continuously reshuffled and redistributed. Every gesture is absorbed even as it ricochets across the surface and keeps the whole in motion. It also requires our willingness to play.
Tálisson Melo
