The work of Pires Vieira, influenced by nineteen-sixties American minimalism, takes an early path, until the middle of 1976, that follows an analytical course of the constituent elements of the practice of painting, which is much more European in origin, and somewhat closer to a structuralist analysis that ran through the theoretical thinking of the several areas of human sciences during this period.

This analytical approach to the practice of painting, which is initially shown through the analysis of the support, is then channelled towards the issue of the colour, then ending, so to speak, in the monochrome canvases with a maximum saturation of pigments, as can clearly be seen in the paintings from 1976.

His voluntary lack of production between that year and 1982, the year in which he takes up once again and immediately finishes the works left "suspended" in the previous decade, will provide the continuation of a great deal of production developed in series which are closed but which possess an easily understood chain linking them, and which now contain a workshop-like accompaniment originated in the analytical experiences into colour, narrative and even memorial components (see "Return to Sefard").

It is the narrative element that, in imposing its discourse, annuls the pictorial component like a travelling companion worn out by time, establishing a synthetic and minimalist language with strong and self-referring narrative values (see "Approximation to an Inventory of Repressed Desires").

The author’s current work, which maintains the element of the series in the exhibitions he has been presenting, is particularly in the field of montage/installation, and he has recently introduced moving images (see "Video") into some works, understood not as a finished object with a total autonomy of its own, but integrated within objects/installations that receive it in its functional aspect, through the stressing of a meaning or of a widening of language.

It is through the narrative and self-referring component, but also through the several, multiple and subtle bridges which it establishes with the art of the last fifty years, that it will be worth carefully observing the work that he has been producing and some of its recent developments.