At first brush, Paulo Pasta’s landscape paintings and abstractions appear to be distinct, unrelated bodies of work. This duality is conspicuous as it’s more common for painters to tend primarily in one direction, or else many directions simultaneously. We have seen in some painters the gradual transition from landscape to abstraction—Piet Mondrian for example—and in others the retention of vestigial observational motifs—Richard Diebenkorn would be an example. Or their work may be separated through the use of a different medium, say drawings for observation of the world and painting for apparently complete abstraction. Think of Ellsworth Kelly’s plant drawings and his hard-edge or Color Field paintings. Pasta, by contrast, would seem to move between genres effortlessly while also retaining some of a specific pictorial language in composition. Where a difference occurs is in the contrast between those expanses of space so typical of landscape and the frontal, more delimited or enclosed surfaces of urban environments. However, gentle tonal transitions and the distinct articulation of narrow verticals persist in many of Pasta’s paintings, whether representational or abstract.
There have been several exhibitions of Brazilian painters in New York recently that share an interest in facture—and scale shifts working in contrast with the size of the canvas—that particular rendering of surface that remains present even as the painting maintains pictorial space and visual depth. I am thinking of both Fabio Miguez at Nara Roesler and Deni Lantz at High Noon. In the case of these very different painters, however, the emphasis on a more tactile surface diverges from Pasta’s thinner, even though varied, paint surface.
The chromatic tone of Pasta’s paintings is one of luminosity and light drawn from adjacent, bright hues. Viewing the works, I noted the compositional strategy of often leaving a horizontal area remaindered at the bottom edge of the canvas. Take, for example, Il Padrino (The Godfather) (2025), one of the larger paintings presented here. The effect of the narrow white strip at the painting’s lower edge is to underscore the idea of a foreground, making clear that the geometric composition of oranges, pink, and pale green exists on a support—that the image is painted on a particular material surface. The transitions between the four different oranges of this image are like subtle gradients of light. In fact it is so understated that I am willing to believe the change in color is a result of color contrast between each orange and the pink or green that abuts it, as well as the varied “quantity” of orange in each separate rectangle of the composition. I find that it is always difficult to describe color as if it were a static material, when, as with Pasta’s paintings, the color used is so active and responsive to the viewer’s own perception. The simple vertical delineation of the painting into sections or spaces recalls Italian painting of the Quattrocento, in particular such works as Piero della Francesca’s Flagellation of Christ (1459–60).
The composition and title of Duccio I (2025) furthers this connection to Italian painting. Here spatial relationships enhance a frontal representation of an architectural structure or the urban experience of the built environment. However, it is not necessarily evocative of the contemporary idea of a glass tower, but rather something that still corresponds to human scale. The space of the painting is poetic rather than rational; the pink, yellow, and blues of the image flip or turn in a planar schema that contradicts the fixed, perspectival frame typical of the later High Renaissance.
Pasta’s abstract compositions on paper, like his paintings on canvas, are made with oil paint but tend toward a looser acknowledgement of the boundaries between shapes. There are modulations of surface area, evidence of layering and building: a pause in the process that leads eventually to the clean-edged compositions of the paintings on canvas. In the canvases, it is color and light that determine the affect of each painting, while the paintings on paper rely on variously mixed and layered paint passages only partially adjacent to neighboring rectangles of color. The use of diagonals is also prominent and puts me in mind of Diebenkorn’s “Ocean Park” series from the seventies.
This exhibition is another opportunity—the second at David Nolan Gallery—to see Pasta’s paintings in New York City. But it also invites us to consider the larger contemporary context for painting produced in São Paulo, Brazil, as we get to see more of this impressive work.
