Victor Gorgulho
Lisbon, Portugal, 2025
Text written for Jos\u00e9 Bechara\u2019s exhibition \u201cWanderings in the Labyrinth\u201d at Carlos Carvalho Arte Contempor\u00e2nea gallery, Lisbon, 2025.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
If visually translated, the \u201cmental image\u201d of a labyrinth can, immediately, lead us into a vertiginous descent that soon unfolds into beauties, pleasures, fears, musings and endless questions related to human existence and also to artistic creation. \u201cDeambula\u00e7\u00f5es no Labirinto\u201d (\u201cWanderings in the Labyrinth\u201d), the title chosen by Jos\u00e9 Bechara (Rio de Janeiro, 1957) for this exhibition, comprises a collection of the artist\u2019s unpublished works, underscoring the multidisciplinary character of his work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Working with different media, Bechara moves through his self-architected labyrinth with the dexterity of a great master: his works, whether in the field of painting, sculpture or photography and beyond, form a cohesive \u201cbody of work\u201d, from an artist who seeks to produce on different media and, continuously, experiments on various fields. Such journey, shared here by the artist with the audience, reveals itself as the one of a fl\u00e2neur<\/em> who wanders through a diffuse and endless labyrinth of possibilities of artistic creation, a labyrinth of so many possibilities, as erratic as it is precise; diffuse but also Cartesian.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In his canvases, Bechara chooses, as a starting point, fabrics that once served as truck tarpaulins; these are very unconventional canvasses, for they are already impregnated with history, experiences, and take some distance from the clean and aseptic surface of white canvases. These are vast, robust fabrics, already marked by time and filled with stains, darkened patches, traces of time and their own existence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n On these fabrics, the artist inserts, pictorially, a kind of grid \u2014 lines and strokes that refer to the order of modern grid \u2014 and creates paintings with geometric motifs \u2014 spheres, squares, rectangles, triangles. It is worth emphasizing the use of acrylic paint and rusty matter, which merge and create, together, an overlapping of volumes, colors and textures. The coexistence of these two elements reveals a painting full of signs of memory, created from the artist\u2019s poetic gesture during his process in his studio.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In these new set of works, Bechara also presents us with the possibility of an experimentation that extrapolates the mere surface of the canvas to obtain its linings. In small-scale works, the artist produces a series of works in circular shapes and beyond to create a metalinguistic relation between the various geometric signs that exist in his paintings and the shapes of the work itself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n He then creates a cohesive set that, at times, refers to the labyrinthic diffusion he evokes in the exhibition\u2019s title, at times to a group of works which can not only shed light on Bechara’s multidisciplinary practice but also catapult oneiric, worldly, sidereal, labyrinthic, Cartesian, and so on, images, with no apparent end.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Victor Gorgulho Victor GorgulhoLisbon, Portugal, 2025Text written for Jos\u00e9 Bechara\u2019s exhibition \u201cWanderings in the Labyrinth\u201d at Carlos Carvalho Arte Contempor\u00e2nea gallery, Lisbon, 2025. If visually translated, the \u201cmental image\u201d of a labyrinth can, immediately, lead us into […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-1658","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/josebechara.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1658","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/josebechara.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/josebechara.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/josebechara.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/josebechara.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1658"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/josebechara.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1658\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1660,"href":"https:\/\/josebechara.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1658\/revisions\/1660"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/josebechara.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1658"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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