Some Words
Yara Sonseca\nThe work of Luis Vassallo is full of recognizable forms that repeat themselves slightly transformed in each painting: there are tubular ones, striped in concentric slats, rounded and filled with circles, helical, sculptural, humanoid, Martian, arborescent. Forms are "organisms with will and passion to affirm themselves," said Rothko, and these in particular have been born from a flowerpot, engendered by the fertile Fauna.\n\nThey are the fauna that inhabit the historical and metaphysical spaces reconstructed through luminous shadows, forceful and brilliantly colored. Spaces born from a practice that dialogues with art history and puts Tarsila do Amaral in conversation with Ezra Pound, De Chirico with Parrhasius. Vassallo likes to quote, he is interested in the place where past and present intersect. The confrontation between drawing and color, abstraction and figuration or the search for opposing concepts in the interior mechanics of each work is not essential here. It is rather about propitiating a fertile chaos born from the encounter between erudition and intuition.\n\nBenjamin spoke of quotations as "highway robbers who burst forth armed to snatch away the conviction harbored by the idle stroller." To follow Vassallo's fauna through the gardens of history is to expose oneself to being assaulted. And what better way to see painting than under the threat of bewilderment? Yara Sonseca