Pedro Sousa Louro: A Measured Language of Form

Pedro Sousa Louro’s work does not announce itself. It settles, lingers, and quietly asserts its presence, like a surface that has absorbed history rather than recorded it. His paintings feel less made than lived with, carrying traces of erosion, reconstruction, and human insistence. Geometry, often associated with clarity and order, becomes in his hands something weathered and emotional, marked by time and touch.

Image: Pedro Sousa Louro. Credit Cultural Dose / Agata Mazur

Working between abstraction and material reality, Louro constructs his works as sites rather than images. They resemble fragments of architecture, walls bearing memory, objects that have endured use, damage, and repair. Based in London, his practice reflects a life shaped by movement, discipline, and an uncompromising relationship with the studio as both sanctuary and necessity.

In this conversation, Louro speaks with precision and candour about geometry as emotion, slowness as consequence rather than choice, and honesty as the only viable measure of growth. What emerges is not a manifesto, but a quiet insistence on integrity, where beauty is found not in explanation, but in what remains open.

Image: Pedro Sousa Louro. Credit Cultural Dose / Agata Mazur

Your work often feels as though it has already lived a life before the viewer encounters it, marked by time, erosion, and repair. When you are building a piece, are you drawing from personal memory, or are you working with something more collective and human?

It's always human, but also with a lived element of deterioration, erosion, and repair.

Geometry and structure play a strong role in your work, yet they are softened by instinctive marks and raw materials. What draws you to this balance between order and intuition, and how closely does it reflect your own inner world?

This personal perspective directly connects to my own inner world, making taste and meaning uniquely intertwined.  

There is a strong sense that your paintings are constructed rather than simply painted, almost like fragments of walls or found objects. What does working with physical materials allow you to express that paint alone cannot?

It's a focus on detached elements that one can always adapt to their own reality, by identifying which aspects resonate most with them and intentionally modifying those elements to fit their personal context. Of course, this only happens if you know how to work through the adaptation process.

Image: Pedro Sousa Louro. Credit Cultural Dose / Agata Mazur

You have lived and worked across different places before settling into your practice in London. How has movement, both geographical and emotional, shaped your understanding of abstraction and identity?

Life itself! But within life, parts of myself play important roles in my work. It's about passion, attention to detail, and ensuring each piece looks the way I want it to.

Your practice is defined by a measured pace and a relatively small body of work each year. In a time where speed and constant output are often rewarded, what does working slowly give you as an artist?

Lately hasn’t been my decision to work slowly and produce slowly. In the last two years, I had to deal with a crucial factor that made me lose time rearranging them to make them stable again.

The parallel job is the most important one, and the fact that I had to transfer the entire 8-year studio to another location was almost traumatic.

Image: Pedro Sousa Louro. Credit Cultural Dose / Agata Mazur

Viewers often describe a quiet emotional weight in your work. It is never loud or dramatic, but it stays with people. Where does emotion enter your process, and how aware are you of it while you are making?

It is very simple! Its geometry itself.

Painting bold, “cold” geometric shapes as I do, it's very emotionally deep for some viewers because it's not a conventional landscape or ordinary figurative artwork that most people want to see or deal with. Geometry is always a sharp vision that resonates with people on an emotional level.

Sharpness, it's always emotional!    

Numbers, letters, and symbolic markings appear throughout your compositions, yet they resist clear explanation. Are these elements part of a private language for you, or are they deliberately open for the viewer to interpret?

Not at all. It's all about beauty in between them. I chose the letters, numbers, and symbols that, according to my taste and the dictates of beauty, I think look very well together.

Your work sits in dialogue with modernist abstraction, yet it feels weathered, tactile, and deeply human. How do you think about your relationship with art history, and how important is it for you to challenge ideas of purity and perfection?

With art history and art legacies and art statements that deeply changed my vision and helped me to understand my vision and ultimately directed me to who I am, it would have taken longer and more difficult for me to reach my artistic identity. So, Legacies, in all we know about buses, are crucial to our lives and to understanding our surroundings.

Image: Pedro Sousa Louro. Credit Cultural Dose / Agata Mazur

What does the studio represent for you beyond a place to make work? Is it a space of experimentation, solitude, confrontation, or something closer to ritual?

The studio, for me personally, is everything. I mean EVERYTHING!!!

Some artists have no attachment to the studio, and even some of them criticise artists like me who need one to work in and with. I really don't care about a fragment of these studio theories.

I LOVE MY STUDIOS. I NEED MY STUDIOS. I LIKE TO CREATE AND REALISE MY ART IN MY STUDIOS AND FROM MY STUDIOS.

Simple as that.  

As you appear on the Winter 2026 cover of Cultural Dose, how do you personally define growth as an artist today? Is it recognition, clarity, emotional honesty, or something that cannot easily be measured?

Honesty to myself, to my work, to my vision. A huge number of lucky witches cannot be measured; it's a very welcome thing too.

The most important thing is to be honest with your art vision and your art's emotional nerve system, which an artist cannot avoid on their journey. Otherwise, without these, one is not an artistic individual; we call such a person an artist.  

Image: Pedro Sousa Louro. Credit Cultural Dose / Agata Mazur

What becomes clear through Pedro Sousa Louro’s words is that his work resists spectacle in favour of permanence. It is not concerned with immediacy or excess, but with resonance, with the slow accumulation of meaning that happens after the first encounter. His geometry does not seek perfection, but sharpness. His materials do not illustrate ideas, but hold them.

As he appears on the Winter 2026 cover of Cultural Dose, Louro defines growth not through visibility or validation, but through fidelity to his own artistic nerve. In a cultural moment driven by speed and output, his practice stands as a reminder that depth is still built through patience, labour, and unwavering honesty. These works do not rush to be understood. They wait, quietly, for the viewer to meet them where they are.