Paulo Pasta is something of an artistic hero in his homeland, Brazil. His work is admired by artists, historians, critics, and collectors alike. He has a rich history of exhibitions and publications by the most eminent local institutions and writers. And yet, astonishingly, this exhibition at Cecilia Brunson Projects is his first solo presentation in the United Kingdom. Pasta’s work is one of remarkable silence and introspection. He makes no sweeping statements that can easily fit into one of the thematic group exhibitions and that are so popular on the international circuit. He does not try to explain or illustrate Brazil, or indeed any other topic. His commitment is first and foremost to his medium, painting, which makes the work entirely accessible but also enigmatic.

Painting is, perhaps surprisingly, not the dominant medium in Brazilian art history. This has created a sense of freedom for those artists who choose painting as their medium and topic, free from the burdens of having to carry the finest of Fine Arts on their shoulders. Within this sub-history of painters’ painters, the heroes are Giorgio Morandi, Ben Nicholson, Alfredo Volpi, Alberto da Veiga Guignard, Maria Leontina, and others for whom painting was more an end than a means. By freeing painting of its traditional role as artistic bellwether for art tout court, the artist can focus on questions that are inherent to the medium.

To approach one of Pasta’s abstractions is to enter a world in which everything is simultaneously objective and entirely relational. His structures are created with an almost deadpan structure of interlocking planes, but the interaction of colours is such that they generate a marvelous vibration that makes the experience of looking at the work sensual and seductive. The rational and the sensual interact seamlessly in his compositions. In this dialogue between reason and feeling, Pasta is reflecting on one of the most distinctive aspects of the history of abstract art in Brazil. Perhaps differently from other contexts in which abstraction was essentially an exercise in rationality and reduction, the artists of the Concrete and Neoconcrete movements in 1950s and 1960s Brazil experimented with an art that was severely mathematical in form, but which spoke to the unconscious in its visual effects. The works of Luiz Sacilotto, Judith Lauand, Hermelido Fiaminghi, Hélio Oiticica, Lygia Clark, and many others, were produced with forms drawn from logic, but in arrangements that would shimmer, recede, vibrate, or shift perspective before our eyes. The leading art critic Mário Pedrosa spoke of the need to ‘sensitise intelligence’, to understand that the eye is just part of an organic and psychological apparatus, and not a calculating machine. In Pasta’s paintings we have a similar dichotomy between reason and sensibility, the material and the intangible.

To the extent that there can be a subject in Pasta’s abstractions, it is colour. Each painting is a specific chromatic composition, carefully tuned to create its own sensorial universe. The relative uniformity of the compositions themselves helps to emphasise the shifts in colour, just as Josef Albers used superimposed squares to create a grammar of colour in his “Homage to the Square” series. When looking at a sequence of Pasta’s abstract paintings, the echoes between the formal architecture of the works serve to heighten the chromatic differences between them. Each is entirely unique in its emotional temperature. A universe of relationships.

In addition to his abstract paintings, this exhibition includes a selection of his landscape works. Pasta maintains two apparently contradictory practices: one that is entirely non-figurative, and the other that consists of representations of the countryside of São Paulo State, the region in which he grew up. While these might at first seem to be irreconcilably different universes, they in fact share some characteristics. First, the relationship between landscape and abstraction is a long one. We can think of Piet Mondrian’s journey to Neo-Plasticism through ever-increasing abstractions of the Dutch landscape. Pasta’s mentor Alfredo Volpi had a similar process, and before that, we have the almost-non-referential cloud studies of John Constable and the ‘blot’ drawings of Alexander Cozens, where the works border on the non-representational. In the case of Mondrian, we have a curious echo between the flatlands of The Netherlands and the expanses of sugar fields in the São Paulo countryside—both are horizontal landscapes punctuated by towers, windmills, electrical pylons, or sugar-mill chimneys to create the basic vertical-horizontal grid that underlies both artists’ productions.

Pasta’s decision to maintain and constantly switch between two separate but related practices is also not entirely unusual in the history of art. We can think of Joaquín Torres-García who continued to paint landscapes, still lives, and portraits alongside geometric abstraction, or Theo van Doesburg who maintained a parallel practice as a Dadaist under the pseudonym I.K. Bonset. In Pasta’s case we can relate the two bodies of work by their shared joy in the act of painting, and in their refined and reduced chromatic range.

One important aspect of Pasta’s work is his role as teacher and mentor to a whole generation of Brazilian artists. One of the reasons there is such a vibrant group of young (and not so young) painters in Brazil today can be attributed to Pasta’s example and advocacy. In a country that does not have a formal art school system, this artist-to-artist training is critical, and Pasta frequently speaks of the importance of artistic pedagogy both in his own training, and in his activity as a teacher.

This exhibition presents a selection of abstract and landscape paintings that give an overview of this remarkable artist’s work. We have intentionally chosen to mix the two genres in the space and in the catalogue to better explore the connections and differences between them. Although in different, and traditionally opposed artistic languages, what these works all share is a deep commitment to painting, to art, and to the value of looking and paying attention.