PEDRO A.H. PAIXÃO

Pedro A.H. Paixão was born in Lobito, Angola, living there until the outbreak of the Civil War in 1975. He grew up in Lisbon, studying painting and drawing at Ar.Co – Arts and Visual Communication Center, Lisbon. He holds a M.F.A. in film and video from The School of The Art Institute of Chicago, and a Ph.D. in philosophy, from Faculty of Letters of the University of Porto. He founded and directs the editorial project Disciplina sem nome (discipline without name) for the Lisbon publisher Sistema Solar | Documenta and Carmona e Costa Foundation, Lisbon. In 2008, he wrote Desenho, A Transparência dos Signos (Drawing, The Transparency of Signs), a philosophical study that both restores an ancient theory of drawing and problematizes the ones accepted in Western legacy, as well as their history, concept and use. He won the international Navigator Art on Paper prize in 2018, and the first major comprehensive exhibition of his work was held at CIAJG, in Guimarães (PT) that same year.

Besides his work with other media – like sound, video, film, or the use of objects and slide diaporamas – Pedro A.H. Paixão has mainly been creating a broad range of monochromatic graphic works, starting with a series of scarlet drawings developed between 2007 and 2017. The pencil follows his hand, drawing creatures and characters who, as they take shape, also found a voice. As if they had something to tell us from a remote past or from emergencies of our present.
Recently, the Portuguese artist has been developing new groups: one, luminous, created with turquoise coloured pencils, and another, darker and more mysterious, made with graphite. In these drawings, dedicated to Central Africa in (neo)colonial times and the possibilities of reparation, the artist broaches the complex topic of restitution and presents visual works where things are felt and though anew – not under the trial of history and morality but under their own light, breaking preconceptions and misconceptions apart. Both series are combining an oneiric atmosphere with complex histories of struggle and emancipation, like the confrontation between an imposed Colonial cosmology, still operating today, and the many resistances lead by autochthonous stories. Pedro A.H. Paixão’s work, simultaneously laborious and delicate, the seemingly quiet form and the multi-layered content make no concessions.

Paixão’s drawing is the most radical attempt to give back to drawing not only the aesthetic centrality it lost centuries ago but also, and especially, the status of a cosmic cognitive means we are no longer able to recognise in it.
– Emanuele Coccia, “Setting the World on Fire”, in Arson | Fogo posto (Lisboa, 2016)

Pedro Paixão’s most recent exhibition [Tabou] brings together the works that allowed him to bring out – and thus to see – Africa, of which he is one of the diasporic children. The lesson he draws out from it – the lesson we all draw from it – is more than astonishing. No judgment seems to come from it. No criticism. No jubilation in the face of a newfound origin. On the contrary, all recognition is literally impossible: if we must draw, it is because sight is always the opposite of recognition.
– Emanuele Coccia, “Being in Nuance”, in Tabou | Drawings (Brussels, 2018)

[ARTICLES]

Essays:

• “Being in Nuance” by Emanuele Coccia, 2018 (EN) (FR)
• “Tabou or the (Im)possibility of Conclusion” by Sofia Lemos, 2018 (EN) (FR)
• “Setting the world on fire” by Emanuele Coccia, 2016 (EN)

Selected press:

• “Pedro A.H. Paixão: The place of thinkable things”, Catarina Rosendo, 2021 (EN)
• “Pedro A.H. Paixão: What Drawing has Brought from the Past”, José Marmeleira, 2020 (EN)
• “Pedro A.H. Paixão, Dessins”, Muriel de Crayencour in Mu-inthecity, 2018 (FR)
• “Pedro A.H. Paixão vence Prémio Navigator”, in Expresso, 2018 (PT)
• “‘Tabou’, que decorreu em Bruxelas”, Tony Da Silva & Tania Moreira in Luso Productions, 2018 (PT)
• “Drawing Now ou la diversité contemporaine”, Robin Massonnaud in L’Express, 2017 (FR)

COLLECTIONS

SOLO SHOWS

GROUP SHOWS

PRIZES