With a background in architecture, Bruno Castro Santos has been developing his artistic practice in the fields of drawing and painting.

 

Since 2009, his artistic career has been focused on the plastic possibilities of an abstract geometric language, his work’s predominant feature.

 

In his last solo exhibition entitled “Sometimes, at Times, Other Times", the author confirms the central guidelines of his research. The exhibition presents sets and series of geometric shapes in which Castro Santos investigates the formal problems of plastic representation on a two-dimensional surface. In these abstract works, the artist addresses issues concerning scale, structure, color or rhythm and dynamism of the composition, revealing the strong influence of gestalt theory in his artistic practice. However, the artist cannot forgo the intuitive and emotional dimension of an approach that includes values such as the accident, the unexpected, and the occasional.

 

In these compositions, clarity and order coexist with chaos without conflict, as do the formal and the informal, unity and fragmentation, intuition and abstraction.

The nonlinear context of these pieces’ typology and their non-narrative aspirations force us to question the predictability and the preponderance of rationality over the sensitive in our representations.

 

Geometric shapes coexist with informal motifs, the organic arrangement of the elements, juxtaposed fragments and displacements, gives these compositions the expressive strength and delicate atmosphere that is so characteristic in the artist’s work. His drawings and paintings tend to explore different perceptual dynamics in an economy of gesture, sometimes in a combinative and expansive rhythm with a strong spatial dynamic. Not a coincidence, Bruno Santos Castro began his artistic career in contact with architecture and his work has borrowed many features from this discipline, as well as the influences of Minimalism and Post-minimalism: the importance of essentiality, of the economy and simplicity of forms, the minimal variations of elements, structures, and a privileged attention to spatial relations and to its own exhibitive context.

 

Sandra Vieira Jürgens

Writer, editor and independent curator, with a PhD in Art History.