The Brooklyn Rail

I recall seeing an exhibition of paintings by Alfredo Volpi and Fabio Miguez at Gladstone Gallery in the Spring of 2023, a beautiful and resonant exhibition. The two artists share much in their use of historical reference and their technical approach, although Volpi, from a previous generation, served in some ways as a bridge, combining an interest in early Renaissance painting, geometric abstraction, and the city, São Paulo, that surrounded him. We can see how these concepts would ultimately come together in Miguez’s current exhibition at Nara Roesler, his first solo show in New York City.

For this exhibition, curator Luis Pérez-Oramas chose a title that refers to the coincidence of a building’s initial ground plan with that same building’s potential horizontal ruin. Representation, as in an architectural subject expressed via perspectival line, spatial plane, and the frontal and flat surface of painting, became central for Miguez, an artist who graduated from the University of São Paulo’s School of Architecture and Urbanism. The paintings presented here are from 2023 and 2024, together with several other less recent works that provide a partial context from the artist's own practice across the last decade.

Looking at the paintings, what comes to mind quickly is a double hybridity: projections of urban planning combined in pictorial space, and surface texture present on both a building’s skin and a painting’s surface. Both architectural and pictorial regimes share marks, both literally and as signs. Miguez’s paintings are self-reflective, prompting an evolving, silent, analogic language. Early Renaissance geometers like Giotto, Fra Angelico, Sassetta, and Piero della Francesca are reimagined within this context through the small-scale paintings of the “Atalhos” series, the word meaning “shortcuts” in English. The compositions both fragment and simplify the perceptual and haptic real.

Take Untitled (2014), in which what could be a vertical grey wall occupies the left third of the painting while to the right, a cream triangle could be a roof, the blue adjacent to it perhaps the sky. This is but one possible reading of Miguez’s shapes. The painted object is itself too an amalgam of fragments—paint, linen, wooden stretchers—that are together sensually present, not only serving to represent some absent referent. The compositions of the Italian masters are thus recoined, bringing forth a different understanding of planar, orthogonal, and diagonal sections. Only a wall, a roof, or a window, these isolated urban abstractions put me in mind of the cinematic cityscape compositions of Ozu Yasujirō and Michelangelo Antonioni, pillow shots or holding shots of longer duration than expected.

Scale shifts occur throughout the exhibition, from the small “Atalhos” paintings, all under 12 inches on their longer side, to, for example Untitled (Casa Ohtake) (2024), which measures just over 67 by 110 inches. Casa Ohtake is ichnographic in conception, but undergoes a transformation in the move from architectural projection to pictorial idea. The color, as in all of the paintings here, evinces a subtle yet resonant light through a palette of concrete grey, pale blue, dark magenta, and turquoise. The edges of Miguez’s flat shapes have occasional shallow slopes that hint at a third dimension, a spatial relationship that is dominant in the smaller paintings. The mute, eloquent composition of Casa Ohtake is tactile too, the surface striated with incisions, scrapes, and pressings of paint.

Just as daily sounds need to be abstracted to be heard—a door opening is recognized as such, not as a hinge’s friction and a wooden sheet creaking—so the bare appearances of the built environment must be returned to elemental shape and surface. When seen through Miguez’s abstracting gaze, the strangeness and beauty of the urban landscape becomes visible.