PAULO ROBERTO LEAL

The exhibition, which features a critical text by curator Mayara Carvalho, highlights a central period in Leal’s production, in which the investigation of a ‘sensitive geometry,’ associated with Rio’s Neo-Concrete movement, becomes a guiding axis of his research, shaping a practice marked by procedures such as stitching, layering, and modulation.

Beginning his artistic trajectory in the late 1960s, alongside his work as an economist at the Central Bank, Leal developed a singular body of work grounded in formal rigor and the experimentation with unconventional materials. From the 1970s onward, he deepened his investigation into the plastic qualities of paper, fabric, and canvas itself, creating objects and compositions that challenge the boundaries between painting, sculpture, and installation.

Meanwhile, the Vilas series (1986), composed of paintings on handmade paper, coexists with a body of work that, in the early 1980s, marks the artist’s move toward larger-scale formats and vibrant blocks of colour—a phase that would become his last before his passing in 1991.