5 minute read
PAULO NIMER PJOTA
Nothing rests; everything moves; everything vibrates. Hermetic Principle 3, The Kybalion
BY DANIELLE AVRAM PHOTOGRAPHY BY KEVIN TODORA
Now a decade old, The Power Station has hosted over 30 exhibitions, serving as ground zero for thought-provoking endeavors encompassing seemingly everything but the kitchen sink: stacks of cardboard boxes and a pile of shell casings, a giant canvas sail, numerous vehicles, a Vegas-style stage complete with a go-go dancer.
A former Dallas Power and Light substation dating to 1920, the building has retained its industrial nature—a blessing (and sometimes a curse) for contemporary artists, who are free to do what they want within and around the architecture. Unlike many reclaimed spaces The Power Station refuses to ornament its bones, showcasing the wear of its years and different iterations, the brick walls and concrete floors layered with flaking paint and imprints of the past. The building acts as an artistic cauldron, a continuously reused vessel whose surfaces are seasoned and thickened by each intervention.
Paulo Nimer Pjota is precisely the kind of artist who thrives in such an environment, a sentiment expressed by artistic director Rob Teeters, who states, “Paulo’s work is well suited for the unique character of The Power Station. While he very much considers himself a painter, the installation operates successfully as sculpture with a defined architectural quality.”
Pjota’s exhibition, Every Empire Breaks Like a Vase, features a series of paintings that echo the gallery’s weathered interior. A native of Brazil, Pjota’s work is inspired by the accidental art of the streets, iconographies created by the passage of time and the remnants of everyday human activity. “I’m interested in how the city can provide painting,” he says. “All of the marks and scribbles are traces that someone was there before you.”
To that end, Pjota routinely employs salvaged metal sheeting as backdrops for his paintings, their pre-scratched and worn surfaces imbued with tangible histories. They are contemporary artifacts whose previous lives we can only attempt to discern by decoding the visual records etched across their faces. Surface is a primary concern for Pjota, and he moves between the metal sheeting and large swaths of unstretched canvas covered by paints he creates from powdered pigments inspired by the colorful homes of Brazilian favelas. The artist opts to work with pigment so the final product doesn’t immediately read as a painting but rather as a building wall or the exterior of a house—a living, functional space as opposed to a static two-dimensional object. The resulting canvases are soft and gauzy, the pigment and fabric interwoven into an ethereal landscape atop which his images can float.
Pjota often works on up to 15 paintings at a time, shifting between pieces as the narrative of each emerges through the careful melding of colors, images, and objects. However, he is anything but precious about his process. While in his studio, the paintings function as living diaries, recording movements both artistic (painterly gestures and drawings) and pedestrian (hastily scrawled notes and phone numbers). This organic approach channels the vicarious nature of urban life, the way we momentarily subsume the thoughts and actions of others via totemic remainders: bathroom-stall graffiti, names etched in oncewet cement, an accumulation of stickers, a telephone pole pocked with staples. All these actions are proof that someone once occupied that exact spot, designating it as a point of consideration, a historic site, a portal through which to travel space and time.
Like the surfaces, the images that occupy Pjota’s landscapes
From Paulo Nimer Pjota’s Cinzeiro series, resin, porcelain, and bronze, each 10.25 x 9.5 in.
serve as connective threads, bridging different historical eras and cultures through parallels drawn between repetitive and recognizable iconography. Images are culled from sources that span the ages: Greek and Roman mythologies and antiquities, Egyptian artifacts, alchemical texts, ancient demonological figures, horror movies, Disney cartoons, and stoner pop culture. Pjota posits a series of identifiers that stretch from myth to meme, forming a Frankensteinian type of language that reflects the lurching way we communicate in an info-glut, post-truth world. He is fascinated by how we record and identify ourselves through visual language, particularly when it incorporates elements of fantasy, mysticism, and horror—allegorical lenses through which to unpack the destabilization of contemporary power structures and the social and economic inequalities set forth by colonial and imperial forces.
Filled with disembodied faces, floating fanged mouths, funeral urns and vases, and feet ranging from the marbled to the monstrous, Pjota’s works exist in an otherworldly realm that veers from the sublime to the nightmarish. Alchemy and Hermetic theory are of great interest to the artist, and one can think of his paintings and sculptures as alchemical experiments, the coalescing of vibrating elements in the quest for universal truths.
In Terror, decaying jester-esque pumpkins float in a midnight sea of bats, ghoulish hands formed by cast gourds reach into this existential plane. The Giant on the Landscape pointedly addresses the political climate of Brazil; it is a lumbering stone monolith cobbled together from feet and fangs. The titular painting, Every Empire Breaks Like a Vase, features a totemic figure with the head of a jacko’-lantern and body of a Greek vase ornamented by the monstrous visage of a Gorgon—an allegorical tale of the self-destructive nature of empires, entities that devolve into the obscene, destined to crack and shatter.
The most striking works of the exhibition are an army of Cinzeiros (ashtrays), which sit amongst the paintings, their rotund bodies adorned with grimacing faces. Formed from a cast of a humble vase found in Pjota’s studio and topped by bronze ashtrays filled with ceramic cigarettes, they are the transmutation of garbage into valuable objects. Pjota’s cinzeiros are the populace antithesis to the empiric bodies, beings that consume and transform the smoke and ashes of fallen civilizations into the mystical. P
Paulo Nimer Pjota, 27 ceramic vessels with glaze, 2021, installation view, dimensions variable Production courtesy of Cerámica Suro, Guadalajara. Behind: O gigante na paisagem (The Giant on the Landscape), 2020, oil, acrylic and tempera on canvas and metal sheet, 90.5 x 107.25 in. Paulo Nimer Pjota, Teeth Showing (detail), 2020/2021, oil, acrylic, synthetic enamel ink, pencil, and pen on canvas and metal sheet with bronze object on metal support, 79.12 x 100.75 in.
