Coffee with bread

by Fred Coelho

There is something unavoidable when painting crosses life and becomes a craft: the need for a routine. Being able to carve out a daily space in which the hours slip away through the mistakes and wonders of work and days. It is necessary to develop habits, define themes, look at the screen in search of a first gesture, go back and forth without fear of getting lost along the way.

From this point of view, a studio becomes a kind of paradox between oxygen and drowning, a space in which nothing often happens in the midst of waiting and solitude. Other times, however, the void sparkles, a color intrudes into the view, a shape spirals in the fingers, the eyes open, music happens. What is seen is not seen, what is believed is not created.

In this exhibition, Patrícia Chueke is seeing and creating. One of the strengths of his painting is the possibility of making the world around him a laboratory of changing forms. A painter with a recognized professional career as a graphic designer, many of her canvases are combined with the tradition of starting from a concrete situation in the world – a cut within the eye's reach, an image seen and saved, a photographic gesture of the retina – to produce the fable of paints. On the screens, the frames of precise scenes in their contours and fronts, in their backgrounds and tones, appear free of any obligation to reality. In this world of acrylics, lines become delirious, edges escape. It is in painting that we always see that the truth of the world is not the opposite of the fiction of forms. If Patrícia resorts to reality as a principle, it is to increase her scope for pictorial invention.

I say this because the origin of many of these paintings are scenes of what happened, sort of decisive moments captured by cameras. His passage to canvas shows us that painting can transform a certain moment into an uncertain one. After all, what exactly is happening around these bodies under the sun, these flesh made of colors, these lives in light and shadow? I dare say that nothing is happening other than the painter's freedom. Patrícia chooses the small moments of life, the simple events experienced by anyone, and invites us to participate in what she sees through her hands.

Like any craft, painting is about falling in love with what you do. It's about building intimacy with the environment, settling daily in doubt and the drift of eyes and gestures. An exhibition is the moment to open this small everyday world to the eyes of others, invite them to come in, take off their shoes, give themselves some calm time to share their doubts, their fears, their emotions. Patrícia calls us to enter this personal world of small moments in inhospitable times. An expanded time in which each painting is an invitation to live with these lives below ground. Welcome: coffee and bread.