Cover photo: Theo Pinto in his studio, Photo Frank Frances, Courtesy of Cadogan Gallery.
Brazilian-born artist Theo Pinto (1990), who is based in New York and was trained in architecture and design, has never lost his fascination with scale and proportion, or with the kind of experience that can emerge from looking at an image or a project for an extended period of time. In his paintings, the rational dimension merges with an ongoing search for what he calls ‘inner light’: a spiritual dimension that emerges in transitional states of light, such as dusk and sunrise, and the gradual fading of day into night — moments when the atmosphere feels unstable and constantly changing. Spiritual, as we said, but not to be confused with anything religious or symbolic in the traditional sense.
For Pinto, light is something to be represented precisely in its unstable, intangible, and unpossessable nature. «My work comes from a distance I haven’t yet been able to bridge: the distance between the state I live in and the one I’m searching for. Painting has become a way of slowing things down», he said. And so, the matte surface of the canvas absorbs, rather than reflects, the light of a sky or landscape, creating, layer by layer, expanses of color that progressively move away from their original reference. «Earlier in my career I held onto those references much more closely. Now I’m much more interested in allowing the painting to evolve on its own. Some of my favorite moments happen when it begins telling me something I wasn’t expecting». It was precisely this journey—and this process—that I wanted to understand more deeply. Our conversation coincided with the closing of his solo exhibition, The Weight of Light, at Cadogan Gallery in London.
1. Your paintings are built through a slow process of layering, sanding, and tonal refinement, until light seems to acquire an almost physical presence, a body, even a certain weight. How much does this way of constructing light come from your background in architecture and design?
I think architecture taught me that experience is something you build.
When you’re designing a building, you’re not simply making an object. You’re thinking about how someone moves through space, how materials receive light, how proportion affects the body, how atmosphere changes throughout the day. Those questions never really left me. Painting eventually became another way of exploring them. I’m not interested in painting light as an image. I’m interested in building a surface that allows light to behave in a particular way. Every layer, every pass of sanding, every subtle adjustment changes how the painting holds light. Sometimes removing paint creates more luminosity than adding it. The process is slow because I’m trying to eliminate anything that feels unnecessary until light itself becomes the subject. Hopefully, what remains isn’t just the representation of light, but the experience of it.
2. Many of your works seem to emerge from transitional states of light: sunrise, dusk, the gradual fading of day into night. What draws you specifically to these moments of passage, rather than to light at its most stable or defined?
I’ve often asked myself that. At first I thought I was simply attracted to the beauty of dawn and dusk, but over time I realized it wasn’t really about the colors. It was about what those moments do to us. Most of the day passes almost unnoticed. We rarely experience time itself. But during a sunrise or sunset, change becomes visible. You can actually watch the world transforming from one state into another. Somehow that makes us more present. I think that’s why people stop to watch sunsets all over the world. It’s one of the few moments when we’re reminded that everything is changing, including ourselves. The paintings aren’t really about a particular time of day. They’re about trying to hold that quality of attention a little longer.
3. You have spoken about searching for an “inner light”. How does this inner dimension relate to the external light you observe in the world? Where, in the painting, do the two meet?
The external light is what first captures my attention, but it’s never really the destination.
We’ve all had moments where a landscape, a piece of music, or a certain quality of light suddenly changes the way we feel. The experience is happening outside of us, but something inside also shifts. That’s what I’m interested in. I think of the paintings as a meeting place between those two worlds. They begin with an observation, but they slowly move away from describing the visible world and toward something more internal. Not an idea, but a state of being. When I talk about inner light, I’m really talking about moments of clarity, presence, or connection that are difficult to hold onto. Painting has become one way of returning to them.
4. Light carries an enormous philosophical, spiritual, and artistic history. Are there particular artists, writers, philosophers or studies that have shaped the way you understand it, or that you find yourself returning to when you work on a painting?
I think my understanding of light has been shaped just as much by my spiritual practice as it has by art.
Spending time in India and studying contemplative traditions changed the way I think about perception and my relationship to painting. I became less interested in describing what I was seeing and more interested in creating an experience that might carry some of that same stillness, presence, or sense of wonder. Of course, some artists have deeply influenced me. Turner, Rothko, James Turrell, and architects like Frank Lloyd Wright, Tadao Ando, and Peter Zumthor have all expanded the way I think about light, color, and space. But I don’t return to them looking for answers or solutions. I return to them because they remind me that light isn’t simply something we see. It’s something we experience.
Looking back, I think they were all exploring the same mystery through different mediums.
5. You describe painting less as image making than as the “construction of a condition.” What exactly is this condition for you?
For me, it’s a condition of attention.
Painting has become a way of slowing my own mind down. Like most people, I know what it’s like to feel pulled in a hundred different directions. The studio is one of the few places where I can stay with something long enough for it to begin revealing itself. I’m hoping the paintings offer something similar. Not an explanation or a message, but an experience where looking becomes slower, quieter, more patient. A space where, even briefly, we become more aware of subtle shifts in color, light, time, and maybe even ourselves.
I don’t think the work changes because you understand it. I think it changes because you stay with it.
6. Your paintings are constructed through geometry, divisions and relationships between warm and cool colours. While you are painting, are you guided more by your own emotional response to the work, or by the perceptual and emotional space you want to create for the viewer?
The geometry is actually something relatively new in my work. For many years, the paintings moved more continuously across the surface. With this body of work (He is referring to those on display at Cadogan Gallery), I began introducing these quiet divisions, not because I wanted to make the compositions more geometric, but because I became interested in how small interruptions could change the experience of looking. Those divisions are there to bend the painting, to interrupt the continuity of light just enough that your eye has to readjust continually. Different passages begin to feel as though they belong to different moments in time, almost as if multiple states of light are existing simultaneously. So while I’m painting, I’m not thinking in terms of geometry versus emotion. I’m thinking about perception. I’m asking how little I can do before the experience of the painting begins to change. If a subtle shift in color or a single vertical division can slow the eye down or create a different sense of space, then it has done its job.