Artist Statement
For Pedro Salles, art, life, death, and the universe are all intrinsically linked. His work is deeply personal and idiosyncratic, drawing from his own experiences, traumas, desires, and visions—sometimes even from a sense of nothingness. Salles explores the human condition, the inner workings of our bodies, and the life of our planet, reflecting on its rapid deterioration as a result of human actions and inevitable climate change. He views each of his paintings as a unique landscape, always changing, as everything we perceive—even the interior of the human body, even nothingness—is a landscape.
Salles’s creative process is about deconstructing, shifting, healing, and fixing space in his artworks. His paintings, regardless of size, begin with layers of plaster, paste, tar, or asphalt—layer upon layer, each made deliberately over the other. Paint slides freely across the surface, manipulated by bursts of thinner and water, creating intentional accidents that remain. Stains, lines, and stripes of saturated pigments, both matte and glossy, are expressed on highly textured surfaces that invite touch. Powerful visceral gestures move across the canvas, bringing tension between intentional direction and chance.
His compositions pulse with unrestrained, even violent movements, subjected deliberately to fatigue and strenuous effort, capturing raw emotions. The scraped paint reveals underlying layers as though unveiling what was hidden, while cascades of light—usually white paint—interrupt the scene. His use of color and movement brings about a constant confrontation between abstract frenzy and an unexpected calmness, conveying the idea that these paintings are in perpetual flux, never fully complete, but always alive.
Salles’s sculptures—which he refers to as sculptural paintings, inseparable fusions of both forms—along with his objects, installations, and text pieces, are all created with the same mental and physical rigor as his paintings. His only rule is a constant desire to create, to stay free, restless, questioning, and curious. As he says: “An artist cannot lower their arms, become comfortable, or else they give in.”
