José Pereira

With thematic intention in the search for new forms of expression a coherent process is discerned in this work. From Neo-Figurativism, in which the artist’s mastery of space stands out, to the disintegration of the image with the purest of Constructivist conceptions through the sense of order and perfection.

As KANDINSKY in his time, José PEREIRA compares painting with music and literature, these three arts being subjected to strict rules and some conventions. The artistic act has for origin the variety of relationships between the plastic components, giving them a new meaning.

José PEREIRA’s language transposes elements of color and forms known since DELAUNAY and MIRO. The geometrical forms submerged in meaningful colors, describe their most intimate sentiments and their relations with the world. The observer can read and even interpret, in a total opposite way the abstract and surrealist vision of the Artist. The fact of giving up, in a deliverate way to entitle his works let the spectator enter without prejudice into his inner world.

This independent Artist, born in Montevideo (Uruguay) and living in Paris since 1968, shows us a revealing ensemble of his whole work: oil, gouaches, drawings, collages and sculptures.

In the middle of José Pereira’s observations, is the man in his relation with the environment, loaded with tensions and in which he moves and merges. In certain paintings the Universe of forms merges with its environment and is transformed, being allowed to be absorbed in certain cases, or even falling into pieces, seemingly without weight, in an iridescent plurality, getting loose from the simplicity of the bottom.

Men and women are reduced to the strict essentials of their characteristics, some time depersonalized behind their face; carrying masks, but communicating among them in continual forms and constant movement, by dancing, embracing or separating.

The works give a supplementary dynamics by becoming integrated into another dimension: the Time.

From a plurality of perspectives is born the illusion of time, successions of movements of forms which approach or go away giving us the idea of evolution in the space and the time. What is offered to the eyes of the spectators is not at all a muddled puzzle, but indeed a thoughtful concept based on a system of complex and artistic symbols.

José Pereira’s works fascinate us by the richness of colors and impress us by their expressive strength.

The composition and the combination of colors and formal elements are as well poetical as plastic, creating a vibrating tension.

In strictly pictorial fields we discover blended forms; labyrinths that lend wings to the fantasy of the observer…

Admiring Joaquin Torres Garcia who introduced modern art in Uruguayan cultural life, José Pereira is in fact nearer Klee and above all the Parisian period of Kandinsky.

It appears simultaneously in his work, cosmic preoccupations and thoughts concerning genetics laws as well as the origins of mankind.

Thanks to this encounter his work expands, aerial, joyous, almost springy, and the result is the most stimulating I know…

Owner of an endless imagination, work seems like that one of a magic draftsman [...] His strong suggestion evoques the calligraphic language of a Klee and each of his paintings shows the beauty of a large cosmic night…

In the task of painting, where –dixit Braque- the first 70 years are the more difficult, José Pereira gives the sense of a young man who nonetheless accedes swiftly to the international league.

Painter of “signs”. You evoque Klee wrongly or rightly?. Klee’s painting is also “magical”. And that is unmistakenly the case of José Pereira’s where each form has its “burden” and each symbol present itself in a state of activation…