Reflecting Tate Modern Painting

Paulo Almeida develops a work that is largely conceptual, procedural and in close relationship with the environments that surround him - notably, the art one. The artist has been working mainly with painting, linking it directly to the space-time context that involves it using constructive strategies usually related to other languages - such as photography, video, performance, installation and site specific practices -, and using it as a way to critically position himself over the art system when revealing its commonly implicit mechanisms of visibility and legitimacy. Focused on a metalinguistic approach to art and its social system, the artist has been keeping a work process that consists in the research and bring to the present of the history - recent or not - of the site where it will be displayed, procedure performed by adaptation to the specific context of each work, always incorporating new strategies and giving to his paintings a strong site specific nature, where the construction process is emphasized rather than the final product. In paintings developed through the constant overlapping of images resulting from their own exhibition's contexts, the artist shows the polyphony of the art and the world, metaphorizing the usually complex network of efforts that compounds it and that tends to cancel memories rather than news, by a permanent selection dynamic, combination, overlapping and erasure, in accordance with the globalization procedures.