The works presented here proceed from a simple gesture: to remove in order to reveal. JOÃO FREITAS works with materials discarded by the packaging industry, notably composite papers and surfaces derived from Tetra Pak. These substrates, designed for the rapid circulation of goods, become fields of intervention. Their original function is neutralized. Their surface is reopened.
Scratching, wearing down, stripping: the work does not add to the material, it subtracts from it. Each intervention removes a layer, thins the surface, reveals an underlying structure. What appears is not an applied image, but an extracted one. The visible is the result of a loss. The drawing is born from withdrawal.
The works function as material palimpsests. The industrial strata, paper, adhesive, film, aluminum, form a compressed memory of production, use, and obsolescence. In attacking the surface, the artist does not seek to restore an origin, but to render legible the successive layers of transformation. The surface becomes an archive of gestures, frictions, and abrasions.
What is at stake here belongs to the order of the infra-thin: almost imperceptible gaps between two layers, differences in density, variations in resistance, thresholds of visibility. The image holds itself in this interval, neither fully erased nor fully affirmed.
The works may be read as maps without territory. Surface topographies, where the traces do not refer to an external landscape, but to the internal history of the material itself: its layers, its weaknesses, its breaking points. The cartography does not describe a world, it records operations.
Withdraw / Draw: to remove in order to trace. The withdrawal already contains the drawing. The image is not produced by addition, but by abrasion. What remains takes form. What disappears renders visible.
Here, the surface is no longer a screen. It is a site of work, resistance, and memory.