A Journey Around My Room, a new exhibition by Paulo Pasta, features a new set of works comprising mostly small-format oils on paper or on canvas. Conceived by André Millan, the gallery’s artistic director, the show officially opens the doors of the new Almeida & Dale’s exhibition space at the Fradique 1360 venue.

While working on the exhibit, Millan noticed a striking similarity between the new venue’s format and that of Pasta’s studio. This coincidence ultimately had an influence on the introspective nature of the exhibition and inspired Pasta to name if after the eponymous book by Xavier de Maistre (1763–1852). Written during the French author’s confinement in his prison room, the literary work proposes an inner journey through close observation of the objects and the sensations sparked by the intimate space — a movement echoed by the pictorial work of the São Paulo-based artist. Here, however, the studio is less of a place of reclusion than it is one of freedom: a space where time and painting entwine, repetition turns to method, and silence turns to raw material.

The featured artworks — mostly small-format oils on paper or on canvas — reveal an exacting visual thinking built through superimposition and pause, as though each color and gesture were the result of listening. This inner architecture, derived from the concrete experience of the studio, informs the exhibition set. However, more so than a theme, the studio’s architecture provides a structural matrix for these artworks: form is organized through day-to-day experience and the rituals of the creative space, as though the painting had inherited the inner logic of the place it was born in. 

The critic and journalist Antônio Gonçalves Filho, the gallery’s cultural director and the author of the introduction to the catalog, highlights this connection between the workspace and the way the paintings are laid out. The canvases, he points out, “are like inner landscapes that document the transit of the body through time.” By turning painting into a continuous gesture of attention and presence, Paulo Pasta reaffirms the permanence of a practice that withstands the noise of the world. 

In addition to the introduction text, the exhibition catalog — featuring graphic design by Raul Loureiro — includes testimonials from five artists who were former students of Pasta’s and served stints as his assistants throughout his career: Alexandre Wagner, Bruno Baptistelli, Lucas Arruda, Renato Rios (current assistant), and Rodrigo Bivar. The texts relay work memories, day-to-day scenes from the studio, and delicate observations on how Paulo Pasta inhabits time and painting. 

Exhibition highlights include photographs by Bob Wolfenson, who documented Pasta’s studio as well as the gallery’s new warehouse during renovation work. Some of these images are in the catalog and will also be on display at the show, tying together two spaces — the private and the institutional ones — that in a way share the same luminous silence.

Paulo Pasta (Ariranha, SP, 1959) lives and works out of São Paulo. Recognized as a leading name in Brazilian contemporary painting, he started his career in the 1980s, working off of tension between color, time, figuration, and abstraction. He holds a doctorate in Fine Arts from ECA-USP and has been a faculty member for over three decades at institutions including FAAP, ECA-USP, and the Tomie Ohtake Institute. His work is in the collections of Museo Reina Sofía (Spain), Kunstmuseum Schloss Derneburg (Germany), Kunsthalle Berlin (Germany), Pinacoteca de São Paulo, MAM São Paulo, MAM Rio de Janeiro, and MAC USP.