The Interval of Painting: Guilherme Gallé Observes the Interior of the Medium

By Luiz Armando Bagolin  |  March 13, 2026
 

Some painters attempt to develop their work through a deliberate rupture from what came before, as though the history of art were a territory that must be abandoned in order for painting to recover its inaugural potency. Within this horizon, the artistic gesture assumes the form of a programmatic restart, in which each work appears called upon to reestablish the elementary conditions of the act of painting itself. The past then ceases to function as a field of active problems and instead becomes a limit to be overcome, often pushed to the extreme of experimentation that, by radicalizing certain historical achievements, ultimately reproduces—under new forms—the very rhetoric of rupture that marked much of the twentieth-century avant-garde.
 

There is, however, another way of dealing with this legacy, less anxious and perhaps more demanding, in which the artist prefers to work not against tradition but within it. In this case, the history of painting ceases to appear as an obstacle or burden and begins to operate as a still-open field of formal and perceptual questions. Rather than attempting to inaugurate a new beginning at every turn, these painters devote themselves to slowly reorganizing certain inherited procedures, exploring their internal possibilities until what once seemed stabilized begins to produce unexpected problems within painting itself.
 

This appears to be the case with the young painter Guilherme Gallé, whose work reveals from the outset a curious absence of historical anxiety. Instead of attempting to prove that he arrived after everything else—as artists at the beginning of their careers often feel compelled to do—Gallé seems to prefer to work as though painting were still a sufficiently complex problem to dispense with gestures of reinvention. What might appear excessively cautious in a young artist proves, paradoxically, rather astute at a moment when so many attempts to “restart” painting end up merely repeating, with delay, the inaugural rhetoric of the avant-garde’s.
 

The exhibition Guilherme Gallé: Between Painting and Painting, presented at Galeria Galatea, São Paulo, signals through its title the intermediate position in which the artist situates his work. The formulation does not suggest a conflict between painting and another language—as often occurred in narratives of contemporary art—but rather an interval within painting itself, an internal space of the medium in which the surface becomes the place where painting appears to observe its own conditions of operation.
 

This interval becomes perceptible right away at the first encounter with the works on view. Broad chromatic fields occupy almost the entire surface of the canvases, while small square or rectangular openings discreetly interrupt the continuity of color. At first glance the composition seems extremely economical, almost austere, yet this austerity gradually reveals an unexpected complexity as the viewer’s gaze lingers before the paintings.
 

What initially appears as a relatively homogeneous chromatic plane gradually reveals itself as a surface constructed through successive passages of paint, in which subtle tonal variations produce a discreet vibration that prevents the pictorial field from stabilizing completely as a uniform plane. The painting seems to have been built not through abrupt decisions but through a patient process of chromatic sedimentation that requires sustained attention from both artist and viewer.
 

The small openings that appear within the canvases play a decisive role in this visual economy, although their presence is too discreet to claim compositional protagonism. They do not function as figures, nor do they impose themselves as evident structural centers; instead, they operate as minimal interruptions that prevent the surface from resolving entirely into a continuous chromatic field.
 

These interruptions produce perceptual inflections that oblige the eye to continually reconsider the extent of the pictorial plane, transforming what first appears to be a uniform field into a territory of almost imperceptible tensions distributed across the surface.
 

Curiously, these openings recall less the dramatic cuts of Lucio Fontana than the small rectangular windows that restorers sometimes open in old walls to reveal layers of paint hidden beneath later surfaces. In such interventions, the goal is not to produce a new form but to make visible what the history of painting itself has concealed. In Gallé’s canvases, something similar occurs, though by an inverse procedure: rather than removing layers to reveal the past of the surface, the artist carefully constructs the painting so as to suggest that something might exist beneath it. Painting thus begins to operate as a kind of reverse archaeology in which what emerges is not the revelation of an earlier layer but the imagined possibility of its existence.
 

An architectural metaphor helps clarify this procedure. In retaining walls, the barbacãs (weep holes) are small openings designed to drain water accumulated inside the structure, preventing the pressure of the liquid from compromising the stability of the wall. In Gallé’s paintings, these small apertures seem to perform a comparable function, acting as points of visual drainage within the chromatic field through which the surface discreetly releases the tensions accumulated in successive layers of paint.
 

This mode of construction causes the painting to advance through minor adjustments rather than spectacular decisions, producing a surface that organizes itself slowly through minimal relations among color, interval and equilibrium. In this respect, Gallé’s work approaches a particular tradition of painting in São Paulo, situated in the historical friction between the geometric rigor of Concretism and the chromatic persistence of Alfredo Volpi’s painting, whose work demonstrated that geometry could sustain extremely complex pictorial experiences without renouncing the instability of paint.
 

The relationship between these two strands has always been less harmonious than historiography sometimes suggests. While São Paulo Concretism sought to approximate art to an ideal of constructive rationality capable of reducing painting to an objective visual system, Volpi’s work seemed to insist—with silent obstinacy—on preserving the indiscipline inherent to paint itself.
 

His flags and façades are not merely geometric structures, but situations in which color seems to oscillate subtly within the surface, as though each chromatic plane were still attempting to decide whether it remains form or returns to the condition of pure pictorial matter. This apparently modest gesture produced long-lasting consequences in Brazilian painting, demonstrating that geometry did not necessarily have to lead to the industrial neutrality imagined by some of the concretists.
 

Decades later, the painting of Paulo Pasta would revisit this problem in another form, shifting the focus from geometry to the chromatic thickness of the surface itself and transforming painting into a field of slow investigation into the tonal intensity of pictorial matter.
 

Gallé appears to work within this territory of discreet inheritances, reorganizing certain procedures of this tradition without allowing his painting to collapse into a direct repetition of these models. In the text accompanying the exhibition, the art historian Tadeu Chiarelli observes that these paintings are organized “as chromatic fields in which small interruptions function as devices that reorganize the viewer’s gaze,” an observation that accurately describes the way these openings continuously alter the perceptual balance of the surface.
 

Yet these interruptions do more than reorganize the chromatic field; they also introduce a temporal dimension into the painting. By suggesting the presence of invisible layers beneath the present surface, they produce the impression that the canvas retains, beneath its relatively stable appearance, the memory of other possible states of the painting itself.
 

The surface thus begins to function as a field in which different temporalities seem to coexist, preventing the work from stabilizing entirely as an image and causing the visual experience to oscillate continuously between what is presented to the eye and what remains only suggested by the painting’s own construction.
 

By situating his work within this intermediate territory, Gallé demonstrates that painting does not need to be constantly reinvented in order to continue producing interesting problems. At the same time, this choice reveals an inevitable challenge. Whenever a language discovers a relatively stable formal system, a question arises that accompanies every mature pictorial tradition: To what extent can that system still produce real displacements within itself? The history of modern painting offers countless examples of artists who, after discovering an effective formal mechanism, spent long periods exploring its internal variations, transforming an initial discovery into a territory of progressive refinement. There is nothing illegitimate in this path, yet it contains a silent risk: The more perfectly a system functions, the greater the temptation to preserve it intact, allowing the method that once organized the visual field to gradually become a limit to further transformation. The paintings presented in this exhibition suggest that the artist has already constructed a relatively clear vocabulary based on the slow modulation of the chromatic surface and on the introduction of small interruptions that subtly reorganize the pictorial field. This vocabulary reveals an acute understanding of the surface of painting while simultaneously making visible the set of decisions that sustain its construction.
 

The formal system organizing these canvases already demonstrates a fairly clear internal logic, yet that clarity does not appear entirely stabilized, which allows each new work to function as a small test of the possibilities of this same system.
 

This provisional condition perhaps explains the sense of suspension that traverses many of the works in the exhibition. The canvases seem always close to an equilibrium that never becomes definitive, as though each chromatic decision remained open to the possibility of later correction. The painting does not present itself as a final affirmation but as a field in which different decisions remain in negotiation.
 

It is precisely within this silent negotiation that Gallé’s work finds its most enduring interest. By treating the surface of painting as a space of disciplined experimentation that is not yet completely resolved, the artist preserves a zone of uncertainty that prevents the canvas from becoming merely the application of procedures already mastered.
 

It may be useful to recall here an observation by Ludwig Wittgenstein, according to which thought employs certain conceptual instruments to reach a position, yet these instruments may be abandoned once they have fulfilled their function—the famous ladder that one uses and then throws away.
 

Guilherme Gallé’s painting shows that the artist has carefully constructed the first steps of his own pictorial ladder. The question that now begins to emerge does not concern the solidity of this construction, but rather the moment when the artist will distance himself from it sufficiently to allow something unexpected to occur once again within the surface of painting.