Carvalho Bernau

José Loureiro: As Piores Flores

As Piores Flores is less a catalogue than a vast archive of a virtually unknown part of Loureiro’s oeuvre: Close to 500 drawings from 1990 to 1996, that chronicle Loureiro’s way towards abstraction. They are grouped chronologically, but that also means by subject matter – Loureiro worked exhaustively and almost obsessively on drawing gouaches of dozens of mouths, flags or noses in a row, as if to rid himself of the figurativeness and the very reality of the parts of the body and parts of the world.

To show this compulsive working-through of any subject while keeping this torrent of drawings manageable, we developed a strict grid-system of 1×2, 2×2, 1×3 or 2×3 works per page that emphasises the repetitiveness of these drawings, and leaves to the reader the possibility to examine the differences and similarities.