Carlos León. A orde das primeiras cousas

This exhibit explores and structures some of the most recent series by the painter Carlos León (Ceuta, Spain, 1948). It looks with special interest into the game of interrelations—both artistic and conceptual—that are established between the radical questioning of all illusionary images put forward by his painting and the purified practice of a three-dimensional production.

In the works of Carlos León there coexist the merely object-based approaches and the installation, that through out of the ordinary force and determination bursts into his most recent works. A play of opposites that the exhibit's title also refers to in The Order of First Things, in the words of the poet Robert Duncan.

Since his beginnings, infused by the subversive spirit of the group Supports-Surfaces, in the mid seventies, until the later developments, resulting from his lengthy stays in Paris and New York, the work of Carlos León is crucial for understanding the process of rupture that, operating from the very heart of painting, diverted these pictorial techniques towards a conscious breaking of the system of visibility and opened them up to the emptiness of an expressivity that has lost the subject of its summons, an expressivity that outlines—in the desolate scene that the painting has become—the traces of that joyful search.