Caetano de Almeida

Brazilian artist Caetano de Almeida’s complex acrylic paintings pay homage to Op Art of the 1970s, as well as recent developments in hard edge abstraction, and to Brazilian textiles. Using thin, colorful lines woven in complicated patterns, sometimes pushed or pulled across the canvas by unseen (or even cut out) forces, they move more like thread than paint. De Almeida uses bright and unexpected color combinations, as with the red and blue of his 2013 canvas Aguados, in which colored lines run from the top to the bottom of the work. De Almeida has cut several circles out of the canvas, and when his vertical lines intersect with the circles, they bunch up as if being moved about by invisible rollers on a press. The colors overlap and form hues of purple and indigo, an additive gesture that balances the reductive role of the circles.

De Almeida has shown his work widely in Brazil and the United States. He has had major solo exhibitions at the Museu de Arte Moderna in São Paulo and has been included in shows at the North Carolina Museum of Art and the University Art Museum at the University of Albany, among others.