SPARK
SI-048, from issue6, 2025.
interview by Lea Xu.
My Approach to Light has Changed Multiple Times Throughout the Last Decade
Gonçalo Preto, a painter originally from Portugal and now based in New York, engages the surface of paint as a site where light takes form. His canvases open onto materiality and atmosphere, tracing the body as it appears in dream and memory. Recent works repaint X-ray films drawn from the news, holding the human figure between exposure and concealment. Having exhibited internationally from Switzerland to Italy, Preto continues to test the edges of painting as presence.
LX Your paintings have a calm aura to them. Is calm something you carry into painting, or something painting gives back to you?
GP More than calm, I would refer to it as stillness or even silence, even though the paintings are not static. I often refer to it as a frequency capable of piercing the body. This frequency can be described as a frozen oblivion in which my paintings exist. Despite the scarcity of movement or action in my vocabulary of painting, there is an unsettling tension that is difficult to express through words. On one hand, I am more interested in raising questions than finding answers; on the other hand, I am consciously creating works that go against a ferocious avalanche of images howling for attention. I prefer to wrestle with a painting rather than finding a resolution in it.
LX What’s the most unremarkable object you’ve ever obsessed over?
GP Either a pair of broken eggshells or a palm-sized Chinese porcelain statue at my grandparents' house.
Glass powder on raw canvas
120x180 inches (305x457cm)
2024
LX There is a sense of precision in both your work and your studio environment. Where does this come from?
GP It is one of the most common comments I hear!
Precision is an acute personal trait. It spills and influences most of my actions and the spaces I inhabit - naturally, translating into my work and studio environment. Regarding the studio, I like to refer to it as a laboratory!
The workspace is methodically organized with different stations for each step of the process, which I like to think of in parallel to the working space of an alchemist or a surgeon. I give a lot of importance and thought to the surface choice, its scale, as well as the pictorial approach, and the way it adapts and complements the painting.
Just as importantly, the happily groomed condition of the brushes is crucial for the good fortune of the painting.
Oil on wood panel
28.7x21.2 inches (73x54cm)
2020
Oil on wood panel
28.7x21.2 inches (73x54cm)
2020
LX You’ve lived in Portugal, Germany, California, and now the East Coast. What's the one thing you’ve taken from each place that’s shaped your practice or your way of seeing?
GP Everything that happens outside of the studio - a living archive.
The people I meet, the places I visit, and the struggles I face are all experiences that inform my bank of senses, and influence my work significantly.
I go through intense studio marathons where I am painting for 12 to 18-hour sessions. I am exceedingly indulgent with my time, and my day-to-day deeply pushes and pulls my practice. The time I spend exploring outside of the studio always circles back into energy I can use in my work. Parallel to painting, I shoot film partially to document my surroundings and, more importantly, enhance my awareness, memory, and patience - which I use as a drawing tool.
LX Since our issue is about midnight, how do you observe and depict light in your own paintings? How does the experience of night find its way into your art?
GP Light is one of the nuclear elements in my work. My approach to light has changed multiple times throughout the last decade. Between 2018 and 2021, I was obsessively interested in trying to understand the depiction of night scenes. I was using the historical technique of chiaroscuro as an abstract void. By simplifying the composition, I was composing these shadowed spaces to create moments of suspense, visual puns, and a sense of discordant reality. The paintings acted as capsules that hold time and touch. Through that exploration, I realized that the void I was trying to represent did not need to exist exclusively through a dark palette.
It naturally shifted and focused on the idea of absence through a series of ghost images. I started playing a lot more with perception and light phenomena, which led me to an investigation of different materials and culminated in the exploration of glass powder. The medium acts as a temporal veil, and the application generates a reflective velvety effect that transforms the works into palpable vessels of light.
Oil on wood panel
18x24 inches (46x61cm)
2024
Oil on wood panel
28.7x21.2 inches (73x54cm)
2020
LX Does insomnia or sleeplessness ever play a role in your creative life?
GP I am writing this at 2:06 in the morning. Absolutely!
I am a night owl by nature, and I spend most of my productive time in the studio after dusk. Most of my paintings, if not all of them, include an all-nighter session. As much as I try to be a morning person and be productive during the day, I always end up on the same schedule that follows no outside agendas.
Recently, I had an experience, not caused by insomnia but by sleep deprivation, which had a profound impact on me. This episode was equally frightening and poetic. I found myself losing control of my subtle body. In a mix of tragicomic feelings, this event marked the end of a mournful chapter and the beginning of coping with that loss. The event amalgamated an out-of-body experience between two realities with a spiritual cleansing caused by an invisible liquid that I felt dissolving my physical body. Given its cause and the neurological links between vision and perception, I wanted to convey that through the language of painting.
Follow Goncalo Preto here.
interview by Lea Xu.
photography by Utkan Dora Oncul.
Spark Interview-048