At David Nolan Gallery, Pasta's new and recent works expand upon his explorations into shape, color, and scale.
An influential figure within the development of contemporary Brazilian painting, Paulo Pasta (b. 1959) maintains a multidisciplinary practice—encompassing painting, drawing, printmaking, and teaching—that collectively uses the language of abstraction to engage with space, time, and perception.
At David Nolan Gallery in New York, a selection of new and recent work illuminates Pasta’s unique compositional sensibility with “passages,” his second solo in the city.
While Pasta’s work employs elements of geometric abstraction or color field painting, his approach is far from systematic or mechanical, instead leaning into allusions of space and dimension. Leaving the structures of his compositions open ended, and making color choices that read as intuitive rather than beholden to scales, creates a site for viewer interpretation and reflection on the nature of perception itself.
David Nolan Gallery associate Tharini Sankarasubramanian noted, “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.”
Across the works on view in “passages,” Pasta’s skill with not only color and abstraction but also scale is underscored. Works created in the same year range from over seven feet tall to just under six inches (one of his “pocket paintings”). Regardless of scale, each is met with the same rigor and attended to with corresponding care; rather than, say, overwhelm the small-scale canvases, the artist’s visual language adapts to the given context, and each is treated as a new entry point for explorations into form and color.
Complementing his total abstractions are a selection of bucolic landscapes that leverage geometry and perspective, with the core ethos of his practice is still unmistakably present, highlighting the breadth of his creative vision.
Across the body of work presented in “passages,” Pasta brings the conversation around the inherent qualities of painting like flatness, color, and shape to the present day, illuminating his own formal and personal lines of inquiry and suggesting a new way forward in the exploration of painting and the viewer’s experience of reality.
“Paulo Pasta: passages” is on view at David Nolan Gallery, New York, through November 1, 2025.
