Briefing Room. Manuel Caeiro at Ponce+Robles Art Gallery

Ponce+Robles presents this show on Portuguese artist Manuel Caeiro, a preeminent creator on the contemporary pictorial art scene. Caeiro questions and extends the frontiers and origins of painting: its most traditional subjects and supports, its structural and formal limitations and its pragmatic and objectivised enclosing that are so often contained within the canvas itself.

In Briefing Room it is painting itself that is the subject and object, form and content, canvas and structure, the initial and ultimate aim of a questioning and creative action, with the latter itself being simultaneously its own active agent and argument. In Caeiro's words:

“The subject is not underlying to the works, it is in the works. Here the subject is the work.”

This exhibition contains seven works that compose and reveal the several different steps in a creative, unique and particular course. We encounter a sketch painted directly onto the gallery wall, a chalk drawing on slate that is the draft for the outline of the whole exhibition, a sculpture that provides an embodiment for the elements dealt with in another work, which is also present, and now in three dimensions, as well as several paintings that are mutually shattered and deconstructed, in a sea of references and multiple meanings that are continuously reinforced and enriched.

Manuel Caeiro was born in Évora, Portugal, in 1975. Of special note among his solo exhibitions are those held at the Palácio Vila Flor, Guimarães, Portugal, in the Lurixs Gallery, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (DownTown, 2009), in the Carlos Carvalho Arte Contemporânea Gallery, Lisbon, Portugal (12 000 m2 dentro de um T0, 2011, Welcome to my Loft, 2007) and at the Portuguese National Museum of Natural History, Lisbon, Portugal (Casas da Caparica, 2005). In relation to his group exhibitions we may mention those held at the MACUF - Contemporary Art Museum, La Corunna, Spain, curated by Paulo Reis (Fiat Lux - Iluminación y Creación, 2010), at the Barrié de la Maza Foundation, La Corunna, Spain (La Colección, 2011), at the Modern Art Museum, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, curated by Luiz Camillo Osorio and Marta Mestre (Terceira metade, 2011), at the Manuel de Brito Art Centre (À Volta do Papel, 2008) and at the Carlos Carvalho Arte Contemporânea Gallery (Surrounding Matta-Clark, 2006). He is represented at the collections of the Culturgest, Lisbon, the PLMJ Foundation, Lisbon, and the Banco Sabadell, Barcelona, among others.

Where.- Ponce+Robles. calle Alameda, 5. 28014 Madrid, Spain.
When.- From September 11 to October 25, 2014.