Mixed media on paper #11: The summer of crossword puzzles

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DATE

01 Jul 2026

AUTHOR

Luísa Salvador

Mixed media on paper #11: The summer of crossword puzzles

AUTHOR

Luísa Salvador

"A few months ago, while thoroughly tidying up some papers, I found a small catalog from a José Loureiro exhibition. It was an informational dossier, a publication with stapled pages about the artist's drawings and paintings from the 1990s, and where I saw a set of images from his "Crossword Puzzles" series. The drawings caught my eye, as often happens to me, because they were simple painted grids, but with such a vivid and marked line. Wow, they just looked like grids, but they weren't."

Crossword puzzles are synonymous with estio (in portuguese). There you have it, a meta-joke about synonyms in relation to crossword puzzles...! Before resorting to the crutch of using a dictionary definition to start a text, I'll allow myself to begin in another way. Crossword puzzles are probably a dying art, and that's what's worrying. The use of patience, or its depletion, is becoming extinct. In the future, we won't even know what crossword puzzles were, nor will we understand what a grid with several little squares made possible, or the exasperation it caused. Being born in the paper age, being a paper generation transitioning to digital, is an enormous joy in life. One of those joys that one didn't choose. It just happened.

Some time ago, I needed to go to a copy shop to print some documents, and I asked the young man behind the counter if they sold envelopes because I needed to mail that paperwork. The young man looked panicked. Then he started thinking about where they could be stored. He brought me some envelopes, of a shape that didn't fit the size of the sheets of paper, and I reinforced, still not understanding what was happening: "It was one of those narrow envelopes, the kind you fold the paper in three to send by mail." He stammered with some discomfort: "I don't know what you're talking about... I've never sent or received a letter." At that moment, I felt sad. For him. He never had the pleasure, the joy, the surprise, the thrill of receiving a letter in a mailbox. That too is becoming obsolete, and part of the problem lies in the degradation of postal services worldwide. That analysis is for another time.

This episode struck me. I realized, from the young man's reaction, the enormous gap that separates the pre- and post-paper era. There are those who no longer even know what a letter is, what stamps are, what it's like to write down friends' addresses in notebooks in case they need to send a postcard while traveling. What a loss of affection, at once so simple and so comforting.

Doing crossword puzzles is synonymous with extended vacations. From borrowing the newspaper already read by older people to finish that page, to the supplementary notebooks of summer memory games used on the beach for days until they were all filled, crossword puzzles are a haven of a certain way of being. They also bring back memories of vacations with friends, the purposeful purchase of the Expresso newspaper just so we could all guess the two-letter word that's a synonym for pig. Engaging in crossword puzzles requires time. In summer, there's time. And in old age too. That's why I found it interesting that estio, which means summer, is also synonymous with mature age. Crossword puzzles are equally a manifestation of maturity, with patience and resilience, but also with the wisdom accumulated by years of life that teaches us more and more synonyms for the same thing.

Personally, I know a centenarian lady who can't go without her daily crossword puzzles. Her grandson taught me all the variations of crossword puzzle books, from the simple crosswords to the enigmas, and that most of the time they have some pretty racy covers that would make any young teenager or stunned old man blush.

But there's something about crossword puzzles that's part of this imagery I've built up over my life—between them being synonymous with summer and a mental activity for the elderly—that I hadn't yet foreseen: the possibility of crossword puzzles becoming synonymous with art.

A few months ago, while thoroughly tidying up some papers, I found a small catalog from a José Loureiro exhibition. It was an informational dossier, a publication with stapled pages about the artist's drawings and paintings from the 1990s, and where I saw a set of images from his Crossword Puzzles series. The drawings caught my eye, as often happens to me, because they were simple painted grids, but with such a vivid and marked line. Wow, they just looked like grids, but they weren't.

The grid has accompanied pictorial compositions throughout the history of art. It is an excellent tool for enlarging or reducing the size of compositions. A grid is placed or drawn over an image, and when transferred to another surface, each square is filled with the same information, at the desired scale. An example that always comes to mind is Peter Greenaway's film, The Draughtsman's Contract (1982), where the painter commissioned to create a series of representations of a British estate rigorously uses this grid system. While in the Modern Age, among painters such as Da Vinci, Michelangelo, Velázquez, or Vermeer, we know of the use of the grid as a painting aid, it is also interesting to understand how the grid begins to gain its own thematic importance in contemporary art. It becomes a record in itself, in the early modernisms with Mondrian, later as an abstract unit among minimalists like Judd, or, in a recognizably central way, as in the extensive work of Agnes Martin. The world seems to be glimpsed through reticular systems and diverse grid openings. However, I had not yet seen the grid present itself through the everyday—as José Loureiro glimpsed, and rightly so, in the basic and ever-present crossword puzzles.

The crossword puzzle grid is indeed unique. When faced with the possibility of designing it, there are multiple variations of filled and empty squares that don't repeat, only regroup. In José Loureiro's Palavras Cruzadas series (1994), the same title is always accompanied by a number. There is a systematization here of the very interior of what is already organizable, like when pages are joined together in crossword puzzle notebooks. They are all parts of a system where you assume the same screen size, like the square scheme that occupies the crossword puzzle page. The scale of the grids is the same within their limited interior. Even though arranged differently, they are the result of the same repetition.

In Loureiro's paintings, the tones are homogeneous, ranging from browns, ochres, reds, and grays. The drawings I found in the catalog are even better. They belong to the same nature as the writing of a crossword puzzle. They are black grids drawn with a raised hand, with small colored spots punctuating the grid, like someone filling in a letter for the first time to see if that's the result they expect. They have a provisional quality, a rough "writing." They are playful paintings, games of solids with black squares that demarcate the connection between one word and another, the empty squares waiting to be filled by the said crossword puzzle. But here, unlike the feeling of victory of someone who has properly filled all the empty squares, what matters is the grid, the result that is yet to come. The exact word doesn't matter, because that would negate the initial mysterious role of someone venturing into yet another crossroads.

Crossword puzzles are, therefore, more than just a summer pastime. They are systems for organizing the world, between the macro-scale beauty of their grid and the renewed challenges of words and their synonyms. It won't be for everyone. Like all interesting things, it has its difficulties. But with patience, wisdom, fun, and willpower, there is no greater pleasure in this summer's drought or in the prime of life.

BIOGRAPHY

Luísa Salvador (Lisbon, 1988) is a visual artist and researcher. She has a PhD in Contemporary Art History from NOVA FCSH, having been awarded a scholarship from FCT - Foundation for Science and Technology (2015-2019). She has an MA in Contemporary Art History from NOVA FCSH (2012) and a degree in Sculpture from FBAUL (2009). In parallel with this activity, she develops her artistic practice. She has been exhibiting regularly since 2012. She won the Young Creators Award 2018 in the Visual Arts category. Alongside her artistic practice, she also writes, including theoretical texts and chronicles. In 2018 she founded the quarterly publication "Almanaque - Reportório de Arte e Esoterismo", of which she is the editor. She lives and works in Lisbon.

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