Resemblances do not worry me. Of course, they could be found if we tap into History or look around at the present-day Brazilian landscape. Plínio Palhano doesn´t try to conceal all of his influences. On the contrary, he consciously makes them known clearly. What worries me is the specific. To know to what degree we are in front of a painting which justifies both the artist´s existence and his individual exhibition.

Plínio Palhano isn´t a dilettante. The thirty-eight paintings he is displaying now are the outcome of half a year of daily work, from 7 AM to 6 PM, with a small lunch break. This makes me think of a link between the theme and the effort of creation. At the same time the artist devotes himself to portraying an activity, he lives his dedication with equal cast of mind of a worker who paints.

Both the violence of the theme and the violence of the creation itself go to the pictures. And, as it appears, the anguish of being part of the thematic process. The theme is clear, known. But the language of narrative hasn´t the same obviousness. It gets pretty close if not to the abstract, at least to the non-figurative. It also impels to an overall comprehension of the display, to a gestalt-like reading: not picture by picture.

It asks the onlooker a full vision rather than a separate one. The perspective must be that of assembly order. Even within a rhythm. As it was born. For this very reason, the pictures were regularly coming out after eight hours of daily work. The pressure that comes from within which has forced the artist to plastically recreate an aspect of life is also to be found here.

Plínio´s pictures are anti-decoration. None of them is on the wall just to compose. They interfere with the ambience. I am sure that during this exhibit, the salons of the Museu de Arte Contemporânea - MAC (Museum of Contemporary Art - MCA) will be transformed into a slaughterhouse, with the symbolic heft the reality itself demands. A slaughterhouse not only for quartered oxen, but also for men psychically and physically quartered.

More than with shapes and volumes, Plínio Palhano fixed with ochre, red and blue, in their hues, the harrowing atmosphere we live in today. It is the painting in all of its strength of the present day recreated by Plínio. I´d rather this individual display - the first one by Plínio Palhano - had not been held at the Museu de Arte Contemporânea, but at the artdealer Carlos Ranulpho´s Gallery.

As well as I´d rather see, aloof, the reaction of this public accustomed to a consumable and decorative art. It would be the stampede of cattle. So it seems to me.