"Decoding" Painting

Graduated in Industrial Design, José Roberto Teixeira Leite Júnior is self-taught in painting. He has already produced individuals at Restaurante Tanaka (2004), Espaço Cultural Maurice Valansi (2005) and Restaurante Piola (2006), in addition to having his paintings on permanent display at Galeria Luz dos Anjos, in Brasília – DF. Abroad, he exhibited in Miami, at the Art Fusion Gallery (2007) and in Belgium, at De Muze Galerie (2007). He recently had a solo show at Cassino Atlântico, at the Angelina Arts Assossiation, as a reward for standing out, first, among more than 120 participants who applied for placement.

Served by good drawing and strong colors, Teixeira Leite's paintings are unmistakable: they almost always represent women, seen both from the front and in profile, geometrically schematized and with bodies that seem to perform unusual movements, if not levitate, freed from the law of gravity, amid scenes in which appear, as recurring elements, chairs that stand on two or three legs, cross those depicted or merge with them, vases with four or five skinny flowers and the chessboard floor, all tied together in a peculiar way and each element obeying its own vanishing point, which creates, on the surface of the painting, ambiguous dreamlike spaces.

Figurative and abstracting, subordinated without rigor to geometric schemes, expressionist, but without repudiating a certain humorous touch, Teixeira Leite's strong painting is paradoxical, in the sense that it also participates in the nature of drawing and, within that, the caricature.

A painting by Teixeira Leite, be it a human figure, still life, landscape or the express that advances on its tracks, will always be, first and foremost, a well-defined form in its contours through a framework of capricious lines, and in a second fragmented, disjointed moment, decomposed into countless colored particles, to finally stand out to the viewer for its expressive content and a sui-generis sensitivity.

Teixeira Leite's paintings are not only intended to be seen, but also thought about, as their raw material is human loneliness, impossible communication, the difficult feat of life.

Teixeira Leite is one of the great talents of the new generations of painters. From the same family as Roberto Magalhães, he expresses his feelings and criticisms with a fine and sensitive humor.