By situating painting as an optical challenge and a practice inscribed in metalinguistic thinking, João Marçal (Coruche, Portugal, 1980) dedicates himself to the exercise of formally understanding what can be understood as his ‘intimate life’. Through a ‘sentimental abstractionism’, the images and visual experiences of everyday life, which are so trivial they become invisible, are decontextualised and rethought by the artist through colour, geometry and repetition.

In his work, the upholstery of the buses he travels in, the wallpaper from his childhood bedroom, almost obsolescent photographic material packaging or old cigarette packets take on an abstract dimension through formal and pictorial exercises. Engaged in a historical and technical understanding of the practice, the artist invokes impressions of light, repetition of patterns and pixelisation of images to create spatiotemporal illusions within the painting, displacing it and challenging its autonomy. In manifest determination, João Marçal pursues an epistemological thought and a reflection on the place that painting can occupy: its almost metaphysical possibilities, or its potential existence beyond physicality.