With Pearlescent Bindu, on view through July 26, 2025, Cadogan Gallery in Milan renews its Cadogan SOLO project, an exhibition program that cyclically dedicates an exclusive space within its Milan premises to a single artist. The protagonist of this new stage is Theo Pinto (Belo Horizonte, 1990), a Brazilian artist currently living in Brooklyn, New York. An architect by training, experiential designer and art director, Pinto has progressively integrated into his practice an increasingly contemporary painting-oriented approach, merging the rigor of design with an intimate and spiritual investigation.
Inside the showcase on 5 Bramante Street, Pearlescent Bindu proposes a visual and conceptual journey that investigates the relationship between the visible and the invisible, between what can be observed and what can only be perceived. An investigation that takes shape through the use of oil color, stretched out in soft, layered brushstrokes in a slow, meditative construction. Far from any narrativity, the work is transformed into pure visual and sensory experience, inviting a confrontation with presence, energy and emotion. The paintings eschew representation to approach total abstraction, evoking a state of suspension, stillness and transcendence.
“In my work, I always pursue light,” the artist says. "Pearlescent Bindu was born from this quest."
Light, in Pinto’s works, is the absolute protagonist. It is changeable, alive, unstable. It acts as a threshold, as a subtle bridge between the material world and the inner world. Painted surfaces react to the environment, changing their appearance depending on the intensity and temperature of the light that strikes them. Nothing remains identical to itself. This principle of mutability is not accidental: it becomes a tool to explore the dynamic relationship between subject and observer, between painting and time, between contemplation and presence.
The very title of the exhibition, Pearlescent Bindu, offers a further key to understanding it. The term “bindu,” in the Vedic tradition, indicates an original point, a primordial cell from which space, time and manifestations of reality take shape. It is a cosmic principle that synthesizes spirit and matter, visible and invisible. The adjective “pearlescent,” mother-of-pearl, on the other hand, introduces a luminous and iridescent dimension, alluding to the continuous change of the pictorial surface. Like light reflected on a pearl, Pinto’s works vibrate with subtle, impermanent reflections that are difficult to capture, impossible to fix. The layers of color overlap like the pages of a silent diary as the artist works carefully, indulging in a rhythm that prescinds from productive urgency. In this sense, painting becomes a meditative practice. A way to enter into relationship with what escapes the immediate, with what, though present, usually remains unnoticed.
In the gallery’s intimate space, the installation emphasizes this approach. The works invite us to slow down, to pause, to replace the speed of the eye with the openness of listening. The silence emanating from the colorful surfaces is revealed as an active presence, opening a gap in everyday experience. In the artist’s view, the contemporary world tends to ignore the more subtle dimensions of human experience. Painting, therefore, can become a tool to rediscover what surrounds us in a profound way, to get in touch with remembrance, memory, the music of unspoken things.
Represented by Cadogan Gallery since 2023, Theo Pinto brings to Pearlescent Bindu a synthesis of his recent artistic trajectory. After graduating in Architecture from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2013, his career has developed on multiple fronts, combining design, creative direction and visual arts. His hybrid training allows him to naturally traverse different languages and media, always maintaining a strong poetic coherence.
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| At Cadogan Gallery in Milan, Theo Pinto explores light as a threshold between the visible and invisible |
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