Aos Montes
Ángel Calvo Ulloa
Pedro França hesitates when I ask him about his work. He explains his paintings through images of different natures and suggestive descriptions that narrate possible situations and point in multiple directions. Accustomed to hearing precise—almost mathematical—interpretations about the motivations that lead some artists to approach each of their works, I am surprised when someone hesitates and turns to other materials that do not always resolve doubts, but instead incorporate more questions into the narrative.
I first encountered his work in 2017, in the context of the Trienal Frestas at SESC Sorocaba, and, a year later, in another group exhibition at Espaço Olhão, also in São Paulo. At that time, an active member of the theater group Ueinzz,1França’s installations responded to a scenographic logic that incorporated costumes from some of the company’s productions, as well as the usual chroma green as a backdrop for a multiple reality—one that could be another, or could be many. In the following years, after repeated and frustrated attempts to visit his studio—mea culpa, I confess—our meeting kept being postponed and only happened by chance in 2025, in Coimbra, where he and the artist Raphaela Melsohn, under the curatorship of Luiza Teixeira de Freitas, shared a project in the rooms of CAPC Sereia.
“I know where they are. Let’s go,” says the boy Flyora Gaishun in one of the most difficult scenes of the film Come and See Upon arriving at an apparently deserted village, Flyora finds a young woman in a state of shock, whom he guides in the search for her neighbors, whose whereabouts are unknown. Running toward a nearby marshy area, the girl turns and sees, next to one of the village barns, a large pile of lifeless bodies. Come and See narrates, from the Russian perspective, the bloody extermination campaign against the Belarusian people by Nazi troops during the Second World War. The image of a pile of corpses is not new to us—we have seen it so many times that, in a way, we become numb before it. The series of paintings Nous ne sommes pas les dernierscreated by the Slovenian artist Zoran Mušič in the 1970s, nearly four decades after his time in the Dachau concentration camp, shows the impact that piles of bodies had on an artist who, in the years following that experience, seemed to return as if nothing had happened to his previous life and to his paintings of Dalmatian landscapes. Scenes filled with rocky elevations and hills that, however, when viewed with the awareness of those heaps he would paint years later, seem to pulse like a premonition of what Mušič was able to see and secretly draw during his internment.
However, piling up is not an arrangement we can associate exclusively with the events mentioned. Pedro França shows me photographs of piles that form in celebratory scenes. Watching the players of a team celebrate winning a title or imagining a group of children having fun in this way carries something playful and, at first glance, very little that is troubling. In a heap of living bodies, grouped by their own choice, limbs become entangled. Someone moves a leg and it seems detached from the body it belongs to. Individuality is called into question and operates, to some extent, a binding arrangement that requires organization to enter and exit. A pile also suggests another kind of abundance: eating a pile of blackberries; having piles of socks to match; accumulating work or seeing our request add to the stack of folders in some government office. All of this also speaks to that individuality being put into question. But I fear that, although Aos montes may be all of this, I sense it could also simply be a ruse that allows Pedro França to continue creating possible scenarios for this connection with theater from which he cannot detach himself.
França often states that drawing is where the essence of what he aims to convey in his work resides. Because drawing is the quickest way to put on paper an idea or image that passes through his mind, and far from drawing from observation, he finds these images in dreams or vague memories, sometimes shaped by certain altered states of consciousness. Aos montes takes shape through a set of large and small paintings approached through diverse techniques—elaborate ones such as strappo or monotype on paper, and more common ones like oil, tempera, and pencil on linen. The evocative nature of the images is perhaps what allows us to connect these solutions with others in which the artist turns to video, large ceramic mosaics, or installations populated with mannequins and virtual resources—supposedly so distant, for example, from these canvases now removed from the wall. I sense that França operates somewhere between the dances of Matisse and the scenes of violence of Leon Golub. Unpredictable collective situations, ghostly presences like those presented in that tree formed by human bodies to which França returns repeatedly. What concerns França is not so much the strict symbolic meaning of an image or an action, but the fact that it remains open and, more than a narrative, constitutes a scenario of its own in which something can happen. Perhaps for that reason, at times, the stage appears empty, without characters and almost without objects. At other times, on the contrary, as if it were a large warehouse of cinematic props, França arranges a great number of objects belonging to irreconcilable temporalities—ready to be combined, displayed, and activated, like Chekhov’s gun.
[1] A companhia teatral Ueinzz, fundada en 1997, é um grupo independente e pioneiro que integra usuários de saúde mental, terapeutas, filósofos e atores.
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