The Thickness of the Image
Pilar Gallery, São Paulo, 2025 (solo)

It’s been a year since Renato Castanhari’s last exhibition at this gallery. On that occasion, curator Tálisson Melo noticed a certain restlessness in his work. It shifted between geometric rigor, a legacy of concretist abstraction, and a diffuse lyricism that bordered on landscapes and romantic-inflected abstraction.

Renato, an experimental artist in the truest sense of the word, operates his studio as a laboratory—a space of trials and inquiries. Here, materials are tested, the limits of support are pushed, and the density of brushstrokes and the chemistry of paints are dissected. Color, for him, is an ongoing field of research. He scrutinizes hue, luminosity, saturation, brightness, opacity, and even turns to digital tools like photographic capture and image decomposition software to extend his investigations.

Yet this analytical precision does not yield works that are Cartesian or meticulously calibrated. Renato seems to waver between opposing forces precisely because, like poets, he probes the materials of his language—color, texture, matter—as though they were phonemes. Minimal fragments, charged with latent meaning, are combined to evoke sensations, trigger memories, and summon affections. By placing one color alongside another, or juxtaposing a sculptural brushstroke against a flat field of color, he orchestrates sensory games that emerge only within the specificities of such encounters.

Now, in 2025, the space that once hovered subtly on the canvas surface becomes more assertive, more corporeal. No longer content with merely evoking depths or atmospheres, it expands into the space we inhabit—making possible a direct confrontation with the work, and with the act of seeing itself.

With his new, small-scale canvases, Renato underscores his desire for painting to claim the status of objecthood. At a single glance, we can apprehend their boundaries, their sides, the wall that holds them—allowing the contours to offer themselves fully to the gaze. The paint, applied thickly and with sculptural gestures, reaffirms, at the same time, an aspiration toward the symbolic and the sublime: vegetal textures seem to emerge, immersed in amber-lit atmospheres. And yet the work also insists on revealing itself as what it is—paint, wood, fabric—matter shared with the world, a vestige of the artist’s formalizing gesture.

This insistence on materiality now manifests in sculpture. These sculptures are composed of the same elements as his canvases—twisted and recombined—but take on vertical, anthropomorphic forms. They are designed to be viewed frontally, akin to paintings in three dimensions. These sculptures serve as the clearest indication that the “wavering” observed in 2023 was, in fact, an investigative movement—a reflection on the status of painting in the world and on how the act of seeing demands that the image occupy the same space as we do.

Renato situates himself within a tradition that runs through Alfredo Volpi, as interpreted by Mário Pedrosa. It is a lineage that understands the artist as an ethical, non-alienated worker—committed to crafting visual experiences that rupture routinized forms of perception, producing an art that challenges the viewer and reaffirms that it is the human being who creates the world apprehended by the senses.

It is no coincidence, then, that Renato resists practices that eclipse vision, denying the painter his terrain of action. His sculptures are conceived to be seen from a single vantage point. Should we be compelled to circle them, essential parts would slip from view, disrupting the sensory experience much as would occur if his canvases expanded beyond the limits of the gaze.

The tradition he aligns with is critical of the role images play within capitalism. It is not by chance that the material and objective character of painting fuels his practice, standing in opposition to the universe of digital images—disembodied, forgettable, designed to disappear and be consumed at vertiginous speed. His use of desaturated, earthy tones, his embrace of surfaces worn by time, reinforce this stance: against the violent luminosity of screens, Renato turns to painting as a craft, in the spirit of Renaissance masters and contemplative modernists.

His refusal to eclipse vision is not merely a formal decision; it is a position. Against the dispersal of digital images—those flickering apparitions that vanish almost as soon as they appear—his painting asserts the permanence of time, the call upon the body, the presence of the work in space as essential dimensions of aesthetic experience.

By Marcos Rosa