After guessing which direction to take inside a building housing numerous exhibition spaces—and climbing a steep staircase that I hoped would get me to Document—I fittingly encountered a large map before taking in the full sweep of “Beginner’s Mind,” Pedro Vaz’s mesmerizing solo show at the gallery.
The map is a topographical rendering of the Ladakh region of the Indian Himalayas, upon which Vaz had recorded by hand the various stops along his five-day, sixty-mile trek from Padum to Lamayuru along a route Portuguese artist Rui Calçada Bastos took in 1991 for a series of photographs. The excursion is plotted by a thick white line of serpentine correction tape that guided us up, up, up through the mountains. Filling the gallery were 108 acrylic paintings on handmade paper depicting views of this rigorous journey, executed in liquescent sunset-hued pinks, lilacs, salmons, greens, and browns. Though Vaz associates himself with the Land art movement, my emotional response to his nuanced palette—and the durational nature of his undertaking—palpably brought the Impressionists to mind, in particular Monet’s views of the River Thames.
While the French painter’s shifting, atmospheric fog effects were described from the fixed perspective of the artist on his hotel balcony overlooking London’s Waterloo Bridge, Vaz’s serial consideration of the mountainous landscape adds the vertiginous motion of walking the earth at a high altitude with a heavy backpack to the ever-changing play of sunlight and shadow. Distance, human and geological time, and the perpetual motion of matter were the subjects of Vaz’s peripatetic works. Each painting, roughly seventeen by twenty-four inches, offered an exacting portrayal of a tremendous region. The artist created trembling depictions of peaks and skies cut by a winding path alongside dizzying, nearly abstract close-ups of terrain that sometimes looked like crashing waves as much as expanses of crumbling desert clay. All of these pictures appeared in a single gallery and were pinned to the walls in a tidy grid.
Perhaps it was the force of water, rather than its representation, that was so overwhelmingly present in these images. While each of the works was still wet, Vaz used a garden hose to remove some of the paint, exposing the white paper underneath. Though they seemed to have been created en plein air, the compositions were actually made about three years after Vaz’s trek—he used photographs and videos shot during his journey as source materials (a selection of these videos, finely edited into a beautiful and distressing loop of dissolves and fades titled Mountain Time, 2024, was installed in a nearby room; its windswept soundtrack scored the whole show). Indeed, it was the negative space where the pigment was washed away that gave the work its signature texture and depth, bringing nothing into jarring juxtaposition with the artist’s delicate coloration and rugged envisioning of the landscape.
One pleasure of the show involved taking in a single painting, backing up to see the whole grid, then zooming back in to a single work again. If one spent enough time in the installation, the white negative spaces in the paintings brought the eye to the white negative spaces between the pieces on the wall. These spaces resembled the graticule lines on a map that serve to demarcate latitude and longitude, holding steady for study and orientation the otherwise unmanageable scale of the earth and revealing our human wish to render everything small enough to hold—if not in hand, then at least in mind. Viewing “Beginner’s Mind”(the exhibition took its title from a 1970 text by Zen monk and teacher Shunryu Suzuki),one realized that the numinousness of art—and the experiences that can inform it—remain magnificently uncontainable.
