MATEUS MOREIRA

Compulsão (2023) reproduces Rodney King’s beating at the hands of Los Angeles police officers in the early 1990s. The episode constitutes a crucial event in the collective struggle against racism and state-sponsored violence and served to dampen the optimistic ideals of social integration of the late 20^th century. The sky is broken like a mirror, giving the scene a prophetic dimension, like a bad omen threatening what is to come. The historical reach and pictorial impact of the work contrast with its reduced dimensions. Moreira’s play of light, clouds and air masses conjures a dense and dramatic atmosphere, reminiscent of Northern Romantic painters of the 19^th century such as Friedrich or Turner. Where these artists were concerned with reducing the number of human participants in a painting to a bare minimum, Mateus reintroduces collective action and narrative impulse into his painting.

In larger paintings like Oblívio (2023), the sky occupies more than three-quarters of the surface. From afar, it seems like a meteorological abstraction whose sole character is the weather. Drawing closer, we realize that ghostly figures navigate in boats on marshy waters. These characters evoke marginal, invisible populations, passing unnoticed under the posts that brush against the sky. They threaten to become part of the background. In spite of the profusion of temperature, light and humidity that Moreira’s paintings bear, they remain haunted by vanishing. In Nêmesis(2023), huge buildings made in a bureaucratic or corporate architecture seem to dissipate in the sky or concentrate into a black void. Among the buildings, a small gathering of people watches a character juggle human heads under the sign of an animal skeleton. The scene echoes a post-apocalyptic collective outcome.