Andrew Reed Gallery is excited to announce Twisting Helix, a solo presentation of new paintings by Portuguese-born, New York-based artist Gonçalo Preto. This is the artist’s second focused presentation with the gallery, following his highly regarded Phantom Limb at our Miami gallery in December 2024. 

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Gonçalo Preto’s painting occupies a mysterious space between technical virtuosity and its subversion, informed by an engagement with photography. Shadow and penumbra emerge as fundamental elements of the tense atmospheres his works conjure, unfolding across scattered narratives that shape a pictorial universe grounded in absence and immateriality. Light sources, darkness, close-up framing, or blurriness operate as methods that sustain a discourse in which the visible is constantly threatened by its own dissolution, evoking an indecipherable temporality marked by fragments of memory and reconstructed images. Embracing ambiguity as an expressive force, Preto’s work proposes an atmospheric density where vision is continually challenged by the unnamable and the imperceptible.

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In Twisting Helix, Preto continues his keen probing of optical phenomena and atmospheric effects. A trio of works on one wall depicts a range of compositions and paint applications in achieving their respective registers. Anterior Chamber draws the viewer in with its fine band of a nocturne scene: the hint of a shadow cast across an object. This darkness – as well as the adjacent haze of crimson – serve as a visual device to heighten the contrast of the nearly monochrome image alongside: a lateral view of the eye. Twisting Helix (After L.L), meanwhile, is an homage to early film animation; Preto softens the intensity of the geometric forms to suggest their overlapping motion. 

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In Snakehips’ Dream, a vertical strip is placed on the opposite side of the composition from Anterior Chamber, with an off-white yellow giving way to a fiery ripple, the result of fine mark-marking by Preto. As in Preto’s prior work The Great Gig in the Sky, this edge calls to mind a spool of film catching fire, a subtle nod to the artist’s interest in the language of photography and alternative processes. The central image of a streak of lights – evocative of a cityscape or a musical scope – was rendered by Preto’s laborious usage of a drypoint needle to prick away the black surface, thereby revealing the gesso underneath. This technique allows for a starker white than would be achieved by paint application on top.  

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In the central work of the show, Apparatus, Preto took as inspiration the stained-glass windows of a now defunct shop in Lisbon. Washy paint application indicative of the glass panes starkly contrasts with the ‘punctum’ of the painting: a disc backlit by the window. This luminescent white disc is scored with lines and suspended by trompe l’oeil blue painter’s tape. The contrast in detailing within this composition allows the white disc to serve as a halo, capably stepping in as the supposed light source – a life form – instead of merely a translucent object.  

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And in Merlin (Self-portrait as a wizard), Preto turns away from economical brushwork to head in a far more maximalist direction. Tattered billboard advertisements are seemingly suspended in mid-air, before our eye gathers a slight haze cast over the trees behind. We are peering through a window, these remnants partially obscuring what lies beyond. This veil embodies time. This atmospheric effect that Preto achieves is informed by his 54-panel Intempéries and its multiple surface treatments on dibond.