• Overview

    David Nolan Gallery is delighted to announce passages, a solo exhibition of paintings by Paulo Pasta (b. 1959), marking the artist’s second solo presentation in New York City. Looked upon as one of Brazil’s most accomplished and beloved painters, Paulo Pasta moves easily between pure abstraction and landscape art. His work evokes architectural space, landscapes both urban and pastoral, memory, and perception through a rigorous yet poetic language of geometry, color, and light. His paintings live in a space that is physical, emotional, and suggestive of worlds beyond ours.

    Whether in the form of small “pocket paintings” or large-scale canvases, Pasta’s works are elegant, compositionally self-assured, and tonally resonant. They recall urban silhouettes, interior spaces, and metaphysical atmospheres – drawing inspiration from the light and palette of São Paulo, where he lives and works with a kind of monastic discipline. 

    The chromatic variations in his paintings, often veil-like and atmospheric, have much in common with Morandi’s chalky paintings, while the use of shape and space brings to mind Ellsworth Kelly and the architectural gravitas of Luis Barragán. A focus on light as an element is also something that unites Barragán and Pasta - even the particularly flat paintings seem to retain and emit light. ‘Thresholds’ in Pasta’s work is evocative of ‘zips’ in Barnett Newman’s paintings which Newman stresses aren’t merely lines or stripes but living structural elements, infused with sublime energy, simultaneously breaking up the color field while also holding it together. Pulsating colors in Pasta’s work recall Rothko’s color field paintings. While Rothko and Bonnard are two of his proclaimed favorite artists, Paulo Pasta creates work that stands solitary and are unmistakably his own. His paintings are quiet, and generous, offering us not a depiction of a place, but the feeling of spaciousness.

    As the art critic Lorenzo Mammi describes Pasta’s paintings, “They are certainly agreeable (the colours almost always gentle, the construction balanced), but by no means submissive. On the contrary, they display a certain buoyant self-sufficiency, an accommodation which rather than pushing us away, welcomes us in.”

    The exhibition’s title, passages, suggests both movement and interiority. It also suggests the transference of something - such as information, or, in this case perhaps a vision or a memory a la Proust’s madelaine. Perhaps the passage we are seeing is not on the canvas, but through it, from the artist’s memory to ours. This points to an important quality in Pasta’s work: the capacity of painting to suspend time, to occupy the liminal space between memory and perception. His paintings speak to an experience that is neither purely sensory nor purely intellectual, but something in between. This intermediary experience has been described by Pasta as “the noise of something.” He elaborates on this concept by explaining: “I really want my painting to be a memory of the world, to have the rumour of things.”

    Geometric forms in Pasta’s paintings recall beams, columns, and doorframes to suggest thresholds and interiors once seen or imagined. Much like in an orchestra, color functions in his work as musical timbre, quietly guiding spatial relationships and emotional resonance, at once breaking up the space and joining it together. A red may feel closer, more intimate and denser than a blue, not only visually, but experientially. Pasta’s palette is vast and not formulaic, and yet they are all characteristically his. Though his surfaces appear smooth and minimal, they are in fact the result of complex chromatic layering, built up with hand-mixed oil paints to achieve precise tones. In certain areas, the paint accumulates into a visible relief, adding further dimensionality to the canvas. Minor imperfections along the thresholds appear exaggerated – they add visual charm and humanize the works. 

    To complement the newer paintings, the exhibition includes recent drawings: paintings on paper that are looser, more gestural, and subjective in tone. These pieces mark a new phase in the artist’s practice. The measured restraint of earlier work has given way to something more immediate and painterly. Line and color embark on less certain paths, and the boundaries become more fluid. Pasta’s paintings on canvas hold a kind of stillness, while his works on paper introduce movement and signal a shift towards greater spontaneity. 

    “If we had to find an ancient archetype, then it would be in the painting of ruins, which describe how human constructions gradually return to nature, by consumption more than dramatic events. And, while we are in the mode of analogies, I would say that the recent large scale ‘polyphonic’ paintings are kin of the Renaissance sacra conversazione: altarpieces in which various characters share the same space, but do not interact with one another, all are turned to the viewer. This is clearly a game, but it serves to remind us, once again, that Pasta’s painting is imbued with art history and literature and that reduction to the simple, which is one of its main ambitions, does not hide complex affiliations.” — Lorenzo Mammi, “What does a painting serve for?”, 2024 

    — Tharini Sankarasubramanian

  • Works
  • ABOUT THE ARTIST

    Over the past four decades, Paulo Pasta has quietly established himself as one of the most revered and consistently engaging...

    Over the past four decades, Paulo Pasta has quietly established himself as one of the most revered and consistently engaging contemporary painters of his native Brazil, demonstrating his mastery of form and color within the two-dimensional plane. Though highly abstract, Pasta’s paintings retain architectural references; one senses the artist constructs his elegant geometries of posts and beams with the purpose of heightening the subtle chromatic variations among them. Whether pale pinks, blues and yellows or more intense, saturated crimson, indigo and ochre, the colors of Pasta’s palettes vibrate and shift in relationship to each other, evoking powerful associations that resist any particular definition or meaning. 

    Light figures prominently in each work, slowly revealing the paintings through soft tonal gradations and imbuing them with a gentle but constant rhythm. Pasta’s paintings can feel as if they are making themselves in front of the viewer, in their own unhurried and deliberate fashion. At the same time, they never quite arrive at their destination, their colors and composition evolving almost imperceptibly with the passing hours of daylight. This temporal suspension acts to bring the viewer into the canvas and its empty, timeless spaces of contemplation; in this way, Pasta’s works reflect atmospheric or metaphysical landscapes more than any actual physical places.

    Pasta has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Museu de Arte Sacra de São Paulo, Brazil; Simões de Assis Galeria de Arte, Curitiba, Brazil; Instituto Tomie Ohtake and Anexo Millan, São Paulo, Brazil; Galeria Carbono, São Paulo, Brazil; Palazzo Pamphilj, Rome, Italy; Galeria Millan, Anexo Millan and Museu Afro Brasil, São Paulo, Brazil; Sesc Belenzinho, São Paulo, Brazil; Fundação Iberê Camargo, Porto Alegre, Brazil; Centro Cultural Maria Antonia, São Paulo, Brazil; Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, Brazil; among others. He had his first solo exhibition in North America with David Nolan Gallery.

    His work is featured in various collections, such as the Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, Brazil; Museum of Modern Art of São Paulo, Brazil; Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de la Universidad de São Paulo, Brazil; Museu Nacional de Belas Artes do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, New York, USA; and Kunsthalle Berlin, Germany, amongst others.

  • Artist