Francesco João Scavarda's practice as a painter is dedicated to the ambivalence of the pictorial method, stressing the duality between the immediacy of calculated reduction and its over-complexity. Immersed in a constantly changing, hyper-evolving loop of reconfiguration, the medium of painting enduringly affirms its substance both through historical legitimation and through the confrontation with fast imagery deriving from the digital sphere.
The complexity of this situation finds its reflection in João Scavarda's work where the image is produced through the use of a complex schema of juxtaposed layers, which allows forms to emerge through subtraction. Delving deep into the calibrated tangibility of the canvas, João Scavarda's gesture is oriented towards the production of images functioning as ideas. Scavarda's canvases play with the history of representation through delicate gouaches in pastel tones which are nearly or completely monochrome. Highly controlled in process and with allusions to elements from classical renaissance to contemporary painting, his works play with surfaces, misleading the eye's perception through layered visual planes and unexpected elements such as cuts or ribbons.
