QUADRA

In Quadra, Daniel Mattar collects printed fragments from his daily life, discarded color charts, packaging, and mundane surfaces, remnants of the industrial and graphic language that quietly shape our visual environment. These materials, often overlooked or destined for the trash, are reclaimed and given new significance. Through this act of poetic recycling, what was once banal becomes a ground for transformation.

Upon these rational, coded surfaces , structured by grids, lines, and typographic logic, Mattar applies sculptural volumes of oil paint in intuitive gestures. The title Quadra (Portuguese for “block” or “quadrant”) refers to the geometry of the substrate, but also to its disruption: paint floods the system, destabilizing its order and introducing vitality, unpredictability, and material excess.

Once photographed in high detail, these painted surfaces transcend their origin. The macro lens reveals what the eye cannot grasp: chromatic landscapes that resemble oceans in motion, tectonic shifts, or abstract topographies. Through light and shadow, the photographic process suspends the gesture in a state of heightened presence.

Quadra is a negotiation between structure and eruption, between design and matter. It evokes not only a formal exploration of color and texture, but also a gesture of reparation, an ecological and symbolic gesture that reclaims and transforms the overlooked surfaces of contemporary life into sites of energy, imagination, and resistance.