PEDRO OLIVEIRA

Pedro Oliveira (born 1990, Portugal) is a self-taught artist. He delves into intimate territories through small-scale paintings, often created on humble materials such as MDF panels or corrugated cardboard. His technical mastery is evident in compositions that blend abstract and figurative motifs, where forms dissolve into ethereal, blurred, and sometimes hazy textures. Through precise gestures and a process of pictorial "deconstruction," he transforms layers of paint to evoke a fragile and introspective universe.

His works are rooted in a personal quest for self-identification and inner reconciliation. Inspired by memories, dreams, and moments of emotional tension, Oliveira describes himself as a cartographer of the intimate—a territory from which he extracts a genuine "atlas" of iconography. The motifs—mental landscapes, dreams and nightmares, fragments of male bodies and sexuality, mouths, and masked portraits—traverse his work to form a complex interplay of intimacy and unconsciousness, balanced on a precarious edge.

"Painting, for me, is a way of giving form to what has no words. Each painting is a map to a part of myself that I am still trying to understand. There are days when I get lost in this quest, but I believe that’s where the true meaning of creating lies: in the very act of finding oneself, again and again."

It is clear that the artist’s commitment is total and uncompromising. Undoubtedly, Pedro Oliveira lives up to the demand Gerhard Richter once attributed to a painter’s work: “To make painting, one must be intimately engaged.”