Leonor Poeiras
Special Guest José Luis Peixoto
From the Latin crudu: that which remains in its original state — direct, intact, true.
There comes a moment when everything that has been constructed falls away. What remains is what has always been there.
Cru emerges from that place.
In a contemporary context shaped by artificial intelligence and growing automation, Leonor Poeiras’s work asserts a return to human presence, imperfection, and materiality. After two decades in the media — a territory of image-making, construction, experimentation, and control — what surfaces here is a practice that seeks the opposite: that which is immediate, physical, and unmediated.
“I am interested in what remains when construction falls away.”
Rooted in the traditions of Abstract Expressionism and Colour Field painting, her practice is centred on gesture, time, and a direct relationship with matter. She works primarily on raw canvas, a surface that absorbs and retains, preserving the porosity and resistance of the material. Paint permeates the fabric, merging with lime — a living substance that reacts, breathes, and transforms — creating unstable surfaces that open, shift, and crack.
In the works on paper, there is a return to the essential: painting as though the rules had not yet been learned, with the freedom of pure impulse. Original texts by the writer José Luís Peixoto, inscribed into these works, extend this sensitive territory between word and matter.
Cru is an act of stripping away. Without ornament. Imperfect and real.