INHABITED PAINTING

For Armory Show 2016, the artist Delson Uchôa proposes the “Pintura habitada” 

[“Inhabited Painting”] project, a sensory and mobile installation, composed of ten 

paintings suspended on two rails, in order to disintegrate them and enlarge them into 

the space. It will allow the incursion of the viewer through mobile painting panels and 

the manipulation of space, creating subjective experiences of color. The work inspired 

by the Neo-plasticism and Suprematism promote dematerialization of physical space 

into virtuality, in order to achieve the integration of time in the work, also called the 

fourth dimension.

For Uchôa (Maceió, Brazil, 1956), the painting has always been a home. His house 

is lined with “Xadrez de chão” [“Ground Chess”], a painting that reflects the light from 

its place, that chromatically welcomes the wanderings of life and marks the pictorial 

development and the prodigality of his artistic practice.

On “Xadrez de chão” [“Ground Chess”], screen-floor of the torrid color of the Brazilian 

Northeast, the artist lives, thinks and works. Like Reverón immersed in pure white in 

“EI Castillete”, like Arthur Bispo do Rosário in a permanent state of art, Uchôa cultivates 

his painting immersed in color. Then, its is extracted from the floor like a membrane, to 

be transformed into chromatic light panels.

Uchôa establishes a close relationship with the Brazilian Neoconcretism, not only by 

the forms, the formal abstractions, but also by creating sensory paintings, just like Hélio 

Oiticica did with his Penetrables and Parangolés, and Lygia Clark with her poetics in 

“Casa corpo” [“Body House”].