In the exhibition Fenestra, held between April and May 2015, at the LURIXS gallery in Rio de Janeiro, Raul Mourão presented five kinetic sculptures and eight paintings from the series Janela/Window. For the first time, one of Mourão’s shows featured painting as its protagonist. His paintings, however, eschew the traditional pictorial approach: they are made using a kind of rectangular stamp soaked in acrylic ink and then pressed against the canvas, creating a geometric grid – or an “impure geometry”, as the poet Eucanaã Ferraz wrote in a text for the exhibition.
The compositions of rectangular forms recall the windows of the facades of buildings. And, thus, through these paintings, the observation of the urban landscape, a theme which Mourão has explored since the beginning of his career in the 1990s, is also a feature of Fenestra. However, the habitual observation of the streets by the artist resonates in Janela/Window in a different way to the previous works where he also explored elements and issues relating to cities. According to him, “the paintings in the series are representations, and no longer direct appropriations of objects from the real world, as was the case in his previous work”. The artist adds: “There is the scale of the window, and forms that suggest landscapes, objects from the street or the inside of apartments. But the images are intentionally not clear or precise.”