Renato Castanhari paints his canvases in the course of a daily confrontation with the materiality of painting. He carefully selects the fabrics to stretch over stretcher bars of specific sizes, conscious of the scales he wants to explore, the gestures that fit within the canvas, the containment of color on the surface, the absorption of oil, and the physical-chemical effects of interactions between the elements that make up a painting. This meticulous discipline may seem like a precise trajectory toward a laboratory-like formulation that is self-contained, controlled, and without escape points—a set of materialized assertions within an inflexible visual unit. However, the body of work presented here reveals, in its persistent engagement with the practice of painting, a vacillating vocation, inclined toward retreat, oscillation, and the surprise that disrupts the monotony of method. His canvases waver between a geometric abstraction aware of constructivism—forming grids or windows of color—and the fragments of latent landscapes in an informal abstraction that embraces liquid stains, melting contours, and impastos overflowing from the canvas.
 
In his studio, alongside paints, brushes, and canvases, there are numerous books and exhibition catalogs that reference the history of abstraction in Brazilian painting. At certain moments, this history sought to stake its claims with imprecise contours, establishing boundaries in shifting aesthetic terrains—disputed frontiers that never found resolution. This gave rise to a defined lineage and the notion of a “national vocation” centered on the presence of geometry. Whether constructive, concrete, or sensitive, these definitions now seem arbitrary and insufficient. Looking back, our vision is often shaped by teleological narratives about the development of a language striving toward its pinnacle or exhaustion. We see abstraction’s unfolding into Neo-Concretism, with its manifestos and programmatic responses. So much has already been done in painting that the language becomes burdened by narratives eager for successive revolutions—assertions of a linear deepening.
 
On the other hand, a more careful immersion reveals both layers of referentiality within abstraction (which some insist on portraying as pure and autonomous from discourse) and an abstract core within figuration. The boundaries or transitions between figuration and abstraction remain in doubt, suspended—they do not solidify in the experience of creation or contemplation. Within a single canvas, multiple vocations pulse together: mental, gestural, mathematical, and spiritual elaborations; chromatic research; optical and material experimentation; philosophical curiosity about form, plane, and signs; studio exercises, insistences, hesitations, disastrous solutions, and successful failures.
 
In Renato’s practice, this vocabulary emerges in a creative tension with the heavy burden of language. To paint today is to paint in conscious dialogue with what has already been done—projected onto museum walls, in encyclopedias and art magazines, exhibitions, studios, and the online portfolios of artists from various generations. This presents a challenge: how to work, to immerse oneself in the unceasing art of painting?
 
The paintings gathered here demonstrate the different directions of his persistent pictorial practice, inclined toward an abstraction that embraces vacillation. A laborious surrender to painting, unfolding with uncertainties and humorously engaging with the failure of grand assertions—even questioning the very act of adding more paintings to the world. His practice is vacillating in the sense that it distrusts itself, analyzes its own paths, and fine-tunes the course of a journey that it knows does not end in itself.
 
Chronologically, the selection of Renato’s works presented here begins with Gruta (2019) and Diluição (2020)—a pair that already carries, in their titles, the hesitation between landscape reference and pictorial self-referentiality. In 2022, his paintings, named after their own color palettes, pursued a seemingly redundant compositional formula—yet always slipping toward landscape, into the depth of a living space filled with signs. By 2023, the compositional structure of a cross at the center of the canvas gained strength, asserting itself through a series of small window-like forms. In this body of work, an apparent unity is destabilized by the perceptible hesitation of the plane, opening in the wall cutouts that reveal different depths—sometimes the surface of the canvas, sometimes the shadowy night of a forest, or the morning sky in Laranjas vacilantes.
 
Entering 2024, coinciding with the completion of his PhD in Visual Arts (in which he examines the notions of the concrete and the intangible as opposing aspects within his own painting), we see a new series emerge—throwing open the windows of the more geometric compositions of previous years and plunging into the affective intensity of spatiality. The horizons that previously only skimmed the edges of his grids now come to life with shifting diagonals, verticalities that tear through the canvas and make it pulse, as seen in Terreno incandescente and Tempestade quente—abstractions where volatile landscapes assert themselves.

By Tálisson Melo