JOãO SOBREIRA

BIO

João Carlos Gonçalves Sobreira (Leiria, 1984) is a visual artist whose practice interrogates the limits of painting by expanding it into processes of sound, performativity, and phenomenological research. Operating between material gesture and experiential perception, his work addresses notions of authorship, self-erasure, and the role of chance as a generative force. Sobreira holds a BA in Painting from the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Lisbon (2013) and two master’s degrees: one in Fine Arts at ESAD.CR (2016), focused on self-representation, and another in Visual Arts Education at FPCEUP (2022). He is currently a PhD candidate in Painting at FBAUL, developing a body of research that explores how sonic structures can inform and disrupt pictorial thinking.

Since 2009, he has exhibited in solo and group shows at venues such as Lisbon Airport (2023), CAE Figueira da Foz (2024), Arte Graça Gallery (2018–2019), Manuel Artur dos Santos Gallery (2023), and Teatro São Carlos (2012). His performative projects include live actions that merge improvisation in music and painting, such as Painting the Music (2025). Since 2020, he has taught History of Culture and the Arts at the Escola Artística do Conservatório de Música de Coimbra.

His work proposes the image as an event—an encounter where the artist relinquishes control, allowing the artwork to emerge as something simultaneously unfamiliar and strangely prefigured.

ARTIST STATEMENT

João Carlos Gonçalves Sobreira develops a painting practice grounded in rhythm, gesture and the body’s perceptual experience of time. He approaches painting as a form of pulsation — a continuity of gestures shaped by inner states, fluctuations of attention and the physical presence of the performer. For Sobreira, the artwork emerges through a dynamic interplay between intention and chance, where the body negotiates tempo, resistance and unpredictability.

His research draws on sound and phenomenology, exploring how rhythm is lived before it is articulated. Gesture is understood not as a depiction of rhythm but as rhythm unfolding materially on the surface. This process produces a sense of multitemporality: each work contains overlapping durations — the immediacy of the gesture, the lingering of memory, and the evolving experience of the viewer who encounters it.

Sobreira conceives painting as a resonant field rather than a fixed image. The work is activated through perception, inviting a multisensory engagement in which looking operates like a form of listening. Chance, interruption and repetition become structural elements that open the painting to interpretation, allowing meaning to arise in the interval between the artist’s actions and the spectator’s presence.