Paulo Pasta

Paulo Augusto Pasta (Ariranha, São Paulo, 1959). Painter, draftsman, illustrator and teacher. At the age of 13, in the improvised studio next to his parents' house, he began his first painting exercises under the influence of lines and colors by Matisse, Monet, Van Gogh and Mondrian. During his youth, he was a student of Carlos Fajardo and Luiz Paulo Baravell. Throughout the 1980s, he studied engraving with Regina Silveira and painting with Carmela Gross. In this decade, he began to have a closer contact with the paintings of Almeida Júnior, Castagneto, Parreiras, and painters of the Santa Helena Group, in particular, Alfredo Volpi. His drawings and paintings, at that time, portrayed, by memory, the landscapes of cane fields in his native land. He creates abstract works, in which he uses a reduced chromatic range, exploring tonal variations. Pasta, through slight scratches on the last layer of paint on the canvas, creates shapes that are similar to those of pediments, amphoras and columns. For art historian Rodrigo Naves, there is a sense of nostalgia in these works. There is also a tonal game in the artist's works, a kind of first color that contains others, which insinuates itself insistently, but the tones and brushstrokes obey only the work's internal balance.
In the 1990s, his work changed and a large part of his paintings had as a motive something reminiscent of a tiled floor with shards. These paintings do not take the viewer's gaze to the horizon, but refer to obstacles and to a space that cannot be clearly seen. In works started in 1994, it presents more contrasts of color, the space expands and the structures become more orderly. However, the thick atmosphere, the density of previous paintings, remains. Paulo Pasta's painting, for the critic Rodrigo Naves, proposes an experience to the observer: it carries a kind of wander, asks for a temporal suspension so that the gaze can dwell slowly on tonal passages and forms, in a slow movement of differentiation.

Submitted by Simões de Assis