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It is when the sign is moved into its, insignificance that the original source, the hidden depth of every nature, will come out. [F. Hölderlin]
 

The generous space of the Celma Albuquerque Gallery is most appropriate for a two-artist exhibition. Whenever I think of the possibility of two works conversing and sharing the same exhibition space, I think first of the differences rather than the similarities. Poetry best reveals its specifics and strength in the confrontation of opposites. The meeting of Angelo Venosa and Paulo Pasta is extremely revealing in this aspect.

The works of Venoso and Posta do not, actually, oppose but rather complement each other. The first impression that they would be separated by an organic /formal aspect is, in a second moment, abandoned. The development of their works slowly reveals that, behind an apparent antagonism, there are important poetic resemblances relating to the temporary aspect of the artistic experience.

Both resists the rushy demand of being contemporary: both, in a way, quietly accept their condition of inadequate to the present time with no conservative nostalgia. Both artists also force a same dilation of time that throbs inside their works, that is, their works refuse immediate delivery.

As stated by Paulo Pasta and this could be related to the works of Venosa " what touches me most, what worries me most is the fact that everything has an end, nothing remains forever, everyone will die all these things follow me. (...) I have the impression that painting is a bit like this for me, my salvation, which ends up the some. My painting also holds this contradiction: at the same time that it has this fading tone, it has the strength of color behind it, a desire that everything is well, on ideal, which is, in a way, its motor strength." In these works, the confrontation of time is, first of all, the awareness of the end, of the limit, not only of man but of art as well.

Both artists came out in a moment marked by a hedonistic euphoria. The result is: they have never fit in the so-called generation of the 80's. Modern tradition still throbs within their works with a positive sign rather than a debauched parody. In Pasta's case, the pictoric act always came and still does, full of hesitation and token by an anguished desire to lead, as well as confront, an announced death of painting. His brush strokes, smoothened by history, gains impressive lightness in the canvas.

The same happens to Venosa. As one of the few sculptors from the so called generation of the 80's from Rio de Janeiro, his choice for bones, carcasses and organic matter guaranteed him, from the star, uncommon strangeness. His personality of a man of few words is transposed to his art and gives him a sign of emulation and seriousness. As time went by, however, his works were gradually cleansed in his search for elements, which were less marked by symbolic references and more resistant to plastic configuration. He gradually freed himself from a romantic tradition relived by Beuys's striking presence in the contemporary scenery and gradually tied figures to the confrontation with materials.

What it seems is that the figure no longer defined the plastic constitution of the works a priori and was generated from the inner sculpture process itself. Instead of determining the making of the matter, the image responds, no submission implied, to its demands. If we compare the portraits made in wood to those made with glass fragments, we can see how wood accepts and smoothens the expression, as opposed to the glass that makes it more severe.

The wooden skulls tend, the more one looks at them, to turn into an actual labyrinth, where the entanglement of cut out lines superimposes the figures. This relationship between the whole and the ports, between a general view of the image and the fragmented view of the composing parts, becomes more and more interesting. It is as if each segment that composes the figure gained strength and moved our eyes away from the imaging towards its making. Those sculpture pieces impose on the viewer the visualization of their making, the fragments are glued side by side and provide the form with an internal rhythm. The plastic evidence of the act of sculpturing cut, break and glue gloss fragments slows down the way to visualize the figure or shape; that is, the formalization time is dilated, expanded, widened.

In the same way, the recurring tone changes in Pasta's works slows down our way of catching the formal structure that moves to the background of the canvas. Whichever those shapes might be, columns or tops, they tend to fade and mix with the veil of diffuse light that provides unity to the composition.

As critic Rodrigo Naves pointed out, "when I look at his painting it seems to propose an experience to the viewer, that is, it has a kind of wandering about, a sluggishness that somehow proposes that the viewer takes a time similar to that of drying up, that of sedimenting things, anyway, a time of the experience". Thus, that time that comes from within the pictoric matter, the experimented and concentrated use of colors, tends to slow our eyes down, to pull them to a moment between seeing and naming, and keep it there.

Pasta's painting places itself in the unthinkable confluence of Ad Reinhardt and Manuel Bandeira the accumulation of historical experience from modern painting together with the rescue of surprise when facing trivial and simple things. All the dryness of the pigment is compensated by the fluent brush stroke thus creating a painting that is timidly stated by postponing its presence.

The tone changes dictate a time, which goes against the hatey contemporary eye. As Venosa's shapes, which come out from the rhythm established by the process of cutting and gluing glass, in Pasta they come out from within the various and extremely subtle tone breaks.

Both artists share, thus, a same desire to take away the sign and its insignificance in order to let flourish a more attentive look at the multiple intensities of the appearing of things.