Opalescent

The practice of Antonio Malta Campos circles around pictorial techniques that float in paints on canvases, papers, and assemblages. His brushstrokes, sometimes incisive, sometimes gliding, also move toward the subtle and airy, in a recognizable trace that transits between figuration and abstraction. For Malta, painting begins in a small notebook, in watercolor sketches that will eventually become canvases filled with color and form. His research follows the path that Matisse described as “construction through color”, it is a plastic investigation of place, the creation and occupation of the sensible. Malta’s abstraction is suggestive, insinuating through different brushstrokes and formats that there is a place of creation in the visual discomfort of geometric precision and the distinctions between the abstract and the figurative. It is in this place that Malta inhabits and is inhabited.

His poetic universe is an expansion of pictorial technique and achieves masterful handling of chromatic profusion. The gradations in his compositions are sometimes subtle, sometimes hyperbolic, floating in blues, neons, and earthy tones, creating a fictional universe based on the contours, lines, and textures of the painting.

The poetic multiplicity is even more evident when we consider other works that display expressionist influences in color and design, paintings that the artist himself called “nervous paintings.” This name highlights the more tense, dynamic, and emotionally powerful nature of these works, where color and brushstrokes act as vehicles for a more raw and immediate expressiveness, revealing the complexity and scope of the artist’s artistic investigation.

Malta invites us to interpret the landscape from other perspectives, reverberating from the matter, in which more opalescent and ethereal hues are noticeable. The most recent materiality is suggestive, unlike other phases such as the heads and characters, in which the figuration was more poignant due to the saturated colors and expressionist strokes.

In the exhibition Opalescent, which brings together recent and unseen works by Antonio Malta Campos, we encounter a curatorial selection of his work that emerges from colors, lines, geometric shapes, and abstract constructions. This production outlines paths in which painting presents more open, cheerful color palettes, sometimes in pastel and soft tones, suggesting a lightness and a more serene atmosphere. These works explore color in its ability to gently construct spaces and shapes. In the layered chromatic overlap, there is a certain pearly luminescence, derived from opal, a gem that reflects multifaceted colors, emanating a milky and iridescent appearance in bluish, reddish, and orange finishes that change as the angle of light changes - Malta’s work is opalescent.

Semiologist Roland Barthes once summarized that “the contemporary is the intempestive”, which strikes the present moment to make it think about itself. Malta projects a deeply intempestive chromatic articulation in painting: his composition operates from a provocative perspective. By establishing a temporality that escapes the immediate, his colors and gestures challenge the spirit of the times, opening up cracks for other ways of seeing and inhabiting the present.

Malta’s pictorial work is a chromatic articulation in the two-dimensional field, demonstrating the deft gesture of reinvention in the studio experience, the investigative process of stacking colors, and formal research that evokes new prisms of meaning from an already recognized and strengthened poetics. In the exhibition, we witness the synthesis of his poetics, a plastic essay that bursts into the exhibition space and reveals singular vectors of meaning.