PARIS.- Diogo Pimentão’s works, simultaneously intriguing and familiar, constitute a research on volume, the body and space. For approximately twenty years, his work has taken the form of sculptures, installations and videos, through a transversal, performative and multidimensional use of drawing. He took up where minimalist and conceptual practices had left off and elaborated a unique spiritual relation to drawing as both an inner meditative practice and an external exploration of art spaces as vehicles of attention and intention.

In his movement, the artist operates with precise gestures, mostly using graphite, paper or cement as mediums, whose malleability is not a given, in order to develop an array of open actions: rubbing, using, compressing, extending, engraving, covering, forming, softening, folding, structuring or spacing. Evoking choreography and imprinting, the repetitive and mindful succession of his gestures instils a particular attention to the minuteness of variation and the assimilation of randomness inherent to this work.

The minimalist aspect of his process radically places itself in our current times. Even by re-using residual tips of pencil lead or mineral powder, ductile and infra-mince, the artist outplays their industrial shape, thus questioning our society’s overproduction. Toing and froing between balance and tension, his works radiate both a sense of serenity and of instability in a barely suspended movement. Each one corresponds to a given processual state, which, empathically, we may catch ourselves mentally visualising.

After these highly physical manipulations, that allow him to go from the surface of the drawing to its potential volume, the original material is hardly recognisable for its ductility and curves trouble perception, evoking leather, velvet or brushed steel rather than graphite. Neither matte nor shiny, but satin-like and slightly glossy, the surface grips light and sends it back, making it seemingly slide over it. Taking the idea of drawing into different perspectives, each sculpture arouses a tactile desire and new perceptual experiences.

Diogo Pimentão skilfully envisages his work’s spatiality, bringing out its architectural essence to the scale of the body. Its physicality is made whole through displacement of the viewer.