Dimensão [Dimension], 2016
In Antonio Malta Campos’ trajectory, which began in the mid-1980s, we see a continuous plastic research around drawing and painting into which he applies a vast repertoire that ranges from modernist artistic paradigms to the languages of mass culture. Both his large diptychs, and his set of small graphic exercises – called Misturinhas [Little Mixtures]– reveal the artist’s technical refinement and his insurgency against the visual comfort of geometric precision and the distinctions between the abstract and the figurative. In the 32nd Bienal, Malta presents two sets of paintings, one created between 2015 and 2016, and another from the Misturinhas series produced between 2000 and 2016. In the first, whith the assistance of Antonia Baudouin, the artist confronts the harmonic tradition of pictorial formalism with a graphic irony, evoking anamorphisms, chromatic contrasts and changes in scale. The Misturinhas, in turn, are central in his research. Little compositions in gouache and coloured pencil; unrestrained strokes of drawing in pencil, pen, or India ink; and cutouts of prints and stickers, they resist to easy classification.