Fabio Almeida Brazilian, b. 1968

Rarely has a contemporary work pointed so relevantly at the alien form that is– or could be – the metropolis as an object in itself. Looking at the paintings is at first glance like seeing a panorama of prominent structures and distant vanishing parts. Simultaneously, and at a slower pace, the gaze is led to travel to a new singular set of complexities embedded in plain sight. Like when being immersed in a cityscape, not everything is coherent, information comes from everywhere and yet makes a whole. Hard edge lines are vertically cast out, while light often points hidden behind, and with it, a horizon banned and forbidden. As I have been looking over these years at the images that Fabio Almeida makes, their inner meaning and parallels with the megapolis, the urban landscape, have been deepening, uninterrupted. Has it been a tunnel vision? Nothing tells me that I am in front of a cityscape. No narrative, no obvious references is provided. It can be just an abstract composition of subtle relationships that are not calling for any associated narrative. It stands by itself in perfect coherence without added reading. Yet, every non-descriptive incidence speaks. There are some idioms tagged small in odd corners that allude to graffiti. There are obstructions, corners, facades, layers, degrees of shadows and light, and a distinct order in chaos.

And there are the colours. Brazil loves primary colours. The facades can bounce of pure yellow, red, blue and green and make a festival out of a street. White is associated with modern times, the great architectural revolution, the eternal spring of the new nation embracing the world at large. Time passes by, though, and with it pollution, dust and dereliction that eat away at the vestige of the grand past of modernism. Colours fade and are spoilt, their pure primary origin contaminated by silvery concrete dust and carbon dioxide, full of the deposits of intense traffic in the distance. Yet, the soil, once ochre and nourished by the forest, informs a tone of terracotta which heals. On the surfaces a grain has given the turmoil of micro dust a protective appearance, has dressed, calmed, cleared the message of relentless exposure. And the more one stands in front of one of Almeida’s compositions, the more this endless decryption of reality opens up, like a Renaissance perspective, in front of us. Not that the artist has wanted to guide us, or even produce a cityscape built for us. He has only let a reality unfold and reminded us that whatever artists do, it is about ways of seeing.