Jornal do Mundo offers its viewers news from a wide array of places, whether from the old new mute world, the future that has become the present, or areas where social segregation is geographically blatant. Blatant, not surprisingly, is one of the most characteristic attributes of graphic language, R. Trompaz’s means of expression.

The graphic in Trompaz’s work manifests itself in different senses. The graphic component can be the theme around which an entire language is structured, a visual vocabulary imagined and synthesized by the artist, not necessarily in the search for an identity that, ultimately, is more interested in its transformation than in any conformation. The graphic also stands out as a component of intensity in Trompaz’s production, materializing in continuous, accumulated, repeated and experimented creation. What, then, might open and be opened by an inquiry into black practices of seriality?** A system of symbols that stand out and consolidate when blatantly examined in each of the multiple monotypes in the exhibition room. And that, accumulated, allow viewers to exercise reading in layers, in the recomposition and a decomposition of the lines’ density.

Here, matter is an escape from form. As a poethical piece, the artwork extends the question(ing)s of causa materialis, the undeterminable of contemplation. Powdered pigment with acrylic varnish on paper, or gouache with India ink, are just two of the paths taken by the artist to spatialize his art. The geographical indeterminacy exposed by Trompaz has much of an improvisation that is aware of the contour lines of the drawing and the unfolding of the imagination.

Interestingly, amid and parallel to the graphic argument that tends to fix gestures and expand lines, Trompaz also shows its opposite, that is, the erasure of line and gesture, another attribute of his investigation into the graphic. Blackness (as object) unsettles the (aesthetic) ground upon which the transparent I emerges. The washing process employed in some of the works allows his visual vocabulary to surface before disappearing, and in this movement of negation – in the creation of a newspaper in reverse – it changes color, becomes pink and inverts the sign of appearance of the known visual vocabulary.

From cavemen to the atomic age, from Capão Redondo to Tijuana, the news presented by R. Trompaz to the world informs the public about an intricate game of drawing, in an expanding, in-your-face poetics.

André Pitol

**Excerpts in bold are from Rizvana Bradley and Denise Ferreira da Silva, in the text “Four Theses on Aesthetics”, published in e-flux (2021).