Shared Roots / Private Jokes

Freight + Volume Gallery, New York
March 1st to March 30th 2024

Freight + Volume is pleased to present Shared Roots / Private Jokes, an exhibition of recent works by Lisbon-based artist Madalena Pequito. Shared Roots / Private Jokes will be on view at 39 Lispenard St. in Tribeca opening March 1st with a reception from 6-8:30 pm and closing. This is Pequito’s first solo exhibition with the gallery.

Madalena Pequito’s works give voice
to storied themes of migration, familial lineages, and identity. Memories both personal and collective saturate her paintings in graceful washes of color and accretive textures. The gestural aspects inlaid into each of her pictures effortlessly toggle between a layered intensity and a watery translucency. All of which imbues her work with a hidden typography inherently significant in its own right.
March 30.

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Pequito’s work is as much a matter of metaphor and symbolism, as it is the preservation of persons and family members she has come to know across her life. Her figures are always situated in a haptic context that reframes their literal presentation, and which makes the activity of preserving their likeness all the more intimate. At the same time, she pushes past the putative limits where an artist remains a neutral observer, unbiased and contemplative. In a painting like A Book Called the 6th of January, for example, Pequito has inserted her own likeness into the scene—not strictly in the manner of self-portraiture, but more in an effort to fuse two distinct temporalities: the time of the painting, as gradually realized by the artist, and the time of the viewer, who sees only the finished product.

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Pequito’s paintings not only depict time spatially, in
the form of repetition, but durationally, by way of signs, signatures, and other nuanced textual markings. In These Roots Put a Roof on My Head, different implications are suggested by the words stippling the fresco-like scene
of several generations of Pequito’s family. Although the family stands together, like a fortress or a wall, the wavy grids and translucent aspects of the work instate a sense of open-endedness rather than closure. In a similar vein, the numbers that feature in the painting Growing Pains have
a fragility about them which contrasts with their seeming exigence. The colored patterns developed across the work suggest that linear time, with its incessant measuring of loss and separation, is a camouflage for something more formless, joyful, and sporadic.

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In her desire to preserve personal memories that might
otherwise be lost to a kind of collective amnesia, Pequito’s
malleable depictions of objects and persons, her use of
language as an open-ended gesture more than a closed-off
statement, creates a familial nexus of portraits, a developing series of intertwined, colorful roots. Viewing her works in this way underscores the symbolism flowing through the exhibition (grids, flowers, faces, roots), while also calling attention to the sense of excitement and hopefulness that animates the carefully cultivated gaps and translucencies her paintings characteristically showcase. What results is as much symbolic as descriptive: a journey through different fields of energy, as the eye observes order forming out of wilding, exuberant growth.

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Text by

Jeffrey Grunthaner