apparent but nonexistent

Galeria Pedro Cera is pleased to announce the fourth solo exhibition by Vítor Pomar in this gallery.

Pomar’s work, which the public at large usually associates to the major body of painting work “in black and white” and in the expressionist style which he carried out in the second half of the seventies, and which has been the object of many revisits and retrospectives, goes through a moment of important re-stating in the mid-eighties, when he decides to embrace the Zen Buddhist eastern philosophy.

From this point on his subsequent works more or less directly always evoke aspects of this philosophy dominated by Zen, and form a prolonging of his meditative thought and practice.

Body and mind co-exist in Pomar’s work and life without hierarchical degrees, and this is the fact that allows him to naturally introduce the subject of sexuality into his work, without this being a separate issue deserving of autonomous treatment or a particular care in its presentation. In Pomar, paintings inscribe sentences/thoughts on the canvas, examples of which are “Apparent But Nonexistent” and “Wish Fulfilling Gem”, both present in the exhibition, photographs represent a couple in the sexual act — “Clear Statement” from 1976 — and more or less serious and more or less fun videos, an example of which is “Slow Sex”, also in the exhibition; all of this stands as an extension of the word and of the artist’s practice, in a harmony of concordance and dissonance with the possibilities of Zen thinking living alongside the physicality inherent to the body.

As João Pinharanda sums up so well, referring to Pomar in a text included in the book accompanying the exhibition “Uma pátria assim…” [A Homeland like This]: “The artist uses several different mediums: drawing and painting, video, photography and photographic montage form different methods of a discourse that, in the same way that it intends to engage body and mind, increasingly also seeks to fuse the verbal into the visual (or to support the visual on the verbal). And his aim is to do so up to an ideal stage of annulling of degrees and levels of interpretation and intervention. these levels are simultaneously individual (the search for inner perfection) and public (thought of as civic and political alerts): Pomar seeks meanings for the individual and the collective. The inscribing of keywords, mantras, or programmatic phrases on the canvases and the numerous texts for reflection and intervention he writes and divulges, often taking on the character of political manifestos, complete the profile of Vítor Pomar’s production: it is abstract and mental, intensely physical and gestural, civic and spiritual, and assumes the dimensions of the true programme of mural painting.”

Vítor Pomar was born in Lisbon in 1949, and lives and works in Assentiz, Rio Maior. Of note among his most recent solo exhibitions are “Uma Pátria Assim…/ Such a Homeland…”, Lisbon Electricity Museum, Lisbon, 2012, “Nada para fazer nem sítio aonde ir” [Nothing to do nor anywhere to go], CAM – Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon, 2011 and “My Own Battlefield (O Meu Campo de Batalha)”, Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art, Oporto, 2003. He will soon be participating in the Congress “Arte e Género?” [Art and Gender?] which will take place at the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation and the Vieira da Silva Museum, where he will be presenting a paper entitled “Je t’aime, je te mange, je te tue”.