Tropical Lines
Paulo Monteiro & Jonathan Trayte
2 February - 9 March 2024
Chalet Mittelgässli, Dorfstrasse 79, 3792 Saanen, Switzerland
The coming together of this show derives from a very personal passion of mine: I love colour! I believe in the power of colour!
Both of the artists, Paulo Monteiro and Jonathan Trayte, have a great understanding of colour and its power to create elegant and whimsical works of art. A daily dose of their work enhances my mood.
There is a distinctly tropical theme to Trayte's work. At the same time, it is very often linear in its appearance, which is where it finds its common ground with Monteiro, who is Brazilian by birth and explores the notion of the line in his oeuvre within a more conceptual parameter.
Paulo Monteiro was born in Sao Paulo in 1961. He continues to reconcile the dual forms of painting and sculpture by constructing a narrative between them. Constantly exploring the margins and limits of shape, Monteiro uses negative space as a medium to make his paintings feel like sculptures, and his sculptures feel like paintings. His palette oscillates between predominantly cool and warm tones, dark blues and a variety of reds that at once create an interlocking depth and almost strident contrast; his whites and greys offer a tactility akin to that of his drawings.
While a malleable physicality permeates his works, Monteiro has also been exploring the possibility of the line for most of his career, manifested as strokes in his work on paper, relief in his paintings, and cuts in his sculptures. His lines are never completely straight nor do they follow a logic. They are pulling in both directions at once, existing in a realm between the affirmation and negation of space.
The exhibition features a selection of Monteiro's oeuvre to date, varying from oil painting and work on paper to bronze sculpture.
Jonathan Trayte was born in Huddersfield, UK in 1980. His sculptures, installations, and functional designs are informed by our global language of consumption. He reinterprets the natural world creating heavily saturated, surreal facsimiles in many varying materials. The work is a coming together of organic forms and saccharine colours. Glossy synthetic skins of paint give the work a colourful pop status, a chameleon appearance and an edible quality.
For "Tropical Lines”, Trayte has created a series of functional painted bronze light objects, once again surprising us with his broad universe of fantastical aesthetic pop design. The 15-plus editioned pieces have been specially produced for this exhibition.
The show runs through 9 March.