Maria
José
Oliveira
José
Oliveira
Sónia Almeida
Lisboa, 1978
Lives and works in Boston
The artist examines the idea of painting as a system of language, a decorative act or a conceptual process. Her paintings feature intense, vibrant colours, applied in saturated smears and layers that are variously opaque and transparent, pushing at the limits of figuration and abstraction.
These elements can also be seen in her tapestries, some of which are created by printing pixelated images onto the material, so that the image mingles with the very texture of the piece. Books as form, texts as a weaving or structuring of words, and writing as formal expression or phonetic oddity are often themes or subjects in her work.
Covering the full range of analogue and digital media, Almeida touches upon the medieval anthropomorphic alphabet, in which the letters are formed by contorted bodies; Raven’s Progressive Matrices, figures used to test analogue reasoning, the capacity for abstraction and perception; patterns generated from errors caused by websites, based on digital images; and techniques and iconographies associated with femininity, delicacy and decorum.
Her paintings, made using materials such as plywood, door hinges and LED lights, mounted onto asymmetrical mechanisms or assemblies, appear to slip, unfurl, overlap and disclose, with plays of perception and illusion that allow them to be viewed in a tactile, performative way, from multiple points of view.
Text originally written for Google Arts & Culture apropos the exhibition “All I Want, Portuguese Woman Artists from 1900 to 2020”, curated by Helena de Freitas and Bruno Marchand
