Pedro Cabrita Reis’s multidisciplinary oeuvre constantly challenges the limits of each medium. An example of this is his work in painting. Since the 1980s, Cabrita Reis's paintings, conceived alongside drawing, sculpture and installation, have taken on an expanded condition, without losing touch with their own history.
This characteristic becomes particularly clear in the series The Cotton Fabric Paintings, produced in 2007. Like the other pieces in it, The Cotton Fabric Paintings #12 continues his research into the figure of the monochrome, first explored in Lisbon Gates, from 1997. Here, the monochrome is framed by aluminium and glass and subjected to flat colour work, resulting in various effects that amplify the painting's possibilities. On the one hand, the type of frame and colour used, typical of the industrial production of windows, doors and walls, give the painting a sense of residential construction, intensified by the scale. The two-dimensional plane takes on three-dimensionality, while the two chromatic bands that segment the plane of the canvas into two rectangular, vertical and symmetrical fields, one black and the other crimson, resonate with the configuration of a double-door window, as well as the division between interior and exterior space that it operates. Meanwhile, the glass, by counteracting the opacity of the colour and the canvas, transforms that functional division of spaces into a symbolic one. In the transparency it induces, the pictorial space reflects not only the public space of the museum, but also the viewer and their imagination. Far from being strictly rational, delimited by traditional pictorial resources, this monochrome admits sculptural and architectural values, positioning the painting in a field of ambiguous forces: as physical, concrete and public; as subjective, virtual and private. 

Sofia Nunes