Raymundo Colares maintained a dialogue with Brazilian constructivism and its historical roots, while also being attuned to pop art sensibilities through his deep connection with comics and cinema. The works of Mondrian, Duchamp, and the Italian Futurists were crucial to his development, even while his work bore evidence of urban imagery and the vibrant colors characteristic of pop art.

In Colares’s work, the popular universe converged on the image of the bus – an iconic symbol of dynamism in major cities. The perceptual experience of multiplication and distortion of objects in motion, which had informed cubism and other modern movements, became central to his interests. The artist worked to bring together disparate planes, fragments of space that seemed to collide – images captured in bursts, free from the nostalgia for perspective or conventional order. Yet his paintings remain structured and articulated, and it’s precisely this complex interplay that creates the work’s challenge. For him, what mattered was fragmenting and reconstructing these pieces in a pulsing, erratic way, illuminating one of the key themes of his trajectory: the idea of time, visually expressed through multidirectional planes and speed.

Raymundo Colares understood that the question of movement – ultimately the question of time – had propelled the experience of painting beyond the stability it had known in the historical past, responding to advances in science and modern life. He sensed that this transformation would extend into the contemporary era, and that the effects of the machine would be intense and irreversible, even though he never experienced the digital world of our days.

Ligia Canongia