In 2022 I started working in my new studio in Mação, which is a small village in the interior of Portugal. Looking at the paintings from that year, they began to reveal the influence of the landscapes of that area, which are characterized by their forests and the wild nature that can be seen in the rocks that pierce the earth on top of the mountains. An environment that enters the senses due to its unique characteristics, with its vegetal mantle of plants used to sinking their roots in stony soil, due to its intense and strong light that accentuates the colors and shapes as if they were carved in metal, to the color of the earth with the nuances of schist and reddish iron rocks, to the immense blue dome that projects its warm light on the pointed canopies of pine trees through which the wind blows with a hiss. Many factors shaped my taste for this geography but above all the familiarity and connection that comes from the time of my ancestors who laid down roots and raised a family there. Initially, when I was younger, I didn't feel very connected to the region, but as time went by I changed and now I feel like I have a home there, a family place. The links with the past begin to make sense when I feel in the scenery that surrounds me a comfort and a sense of belonging that is different from what I feel anywhere else.

The fact that I started working there gave some interesting results because I realized that I was being permeable to that influence in the way I was doing things. Initially it was the need to work in large formats, I needed scale, to feel immersed in the painting as I felt immersed when I went for walks in the surrounding area. At the time I had a set of already painted canvases that were the result of previous phases and which I decided to reuse using the back of the canvases which was raw cotton fabric. Most of the works started to have two faces, the front and the back and that alone brought a new dimension because working on raw canvas requires another approach and allows us to take advantage of the fabric's absorption capacity like paper, which It allowed me to use charcoal and Indian ink together with acrylic paints and with that I established a connection with the work of previous years in which I used paper.

Not everything was new in what was happening in the paintings at that time, there is no such border when starting a new series. There were connections and there were influences that came from behind, it was possible to recognize points of contact in works from previous years, despite the new tones, they were supported by antecedents that gave me the security of launching myself into new perspectives and this also had to do with a certain lifestyle that was changing for me, away from the hustle and bustle, with a lot of time to reflect, to be quiet and immerse myself in paintings.

  I usually work in series because I feel that the theme doesn't end in a single painting and because I generally need some time to mature my ideas and while that happens I move from one work to another and as a result I find myself working on seven or eight works at the same time and that is why there is continuity. When a series shows symptoms of being exhausted, it means that I have already found other reasons or another way of expressing myself, however it is normal that there are strong connections and points of contact between different series. With regard to the “Ageless in the Raw” series, analyzing the first sketches there are references to even older works that date back to 2015, to another set, which I think were the cradle of what was now happening, because In part, they were also the result of the influence of my walks on foot all over the place, and also of my growing interest in coming here to spend short periods of time. The “Fleeting Induction” series, which is mostly executed on paper, already has the genesis of what came next with “Ageless in the Raw”. A revolution was not happening but rather a transition, as happens with a new skin that is worn according to a new season or the need to adapt the body to another phase of life. There was a bridge that was being built in connection with my previous experience, with what I had already learned about the representation of the landscape, with what I was interested in retaining about consciousness and the way of seeing as a result of individuality, of my filter and the impressions that come from it.

If the landscape contains the spirit of the place, in a way this spirit is also linked to the identity of the observer. This notion has become increasingly evident because my connection with places has the tone of consciousness, of the feeling that accompanies me and is part of the memory and history of any person's wanderings. The landscape is not a place, it is many places that intertwine depending on movement and the passage of time, it is a film that plays continuously and where there are no isolated compartments, there is continuity and what memory does with this continuity is largely part of the image we have of the world. The interest in landscape goes beyond the representation of a space, it includes context references and the interpretation of the context is part of this creation process.

The fact of spending more time in a place surrounded by raw nature, in a territory with almost no population, led me to focus my attention on the landscape and dedicate more time to observing the nuances of that mountain scenery, trying to understand the vitality of the nature and above all enjoying the visual pleasure of the immense variety of colors and shapes that give the illusion of being immersed in a constantly changing installation. This period was marked by a learning experience that has to do with something very peculiar - the signature of each site and each geographical area - There is a vital force in nature that is specific to each location, this energy leaves a mark on the landscape that differs from place to place and which is difficult to specify in detail but which as a whole becomes recognizable and which we come to identify as “that place”. This matrix becomes a symbol when it comes to characterizing the landscape and has to do with the organization of reality, with the textures and colors, with the relative position of each thing, with the specificities of the elements, the smells, the brightness of the surfaces, the roughness of the ground and the color of the sky. The symbols that interested me in “Ageless in the Raw” were for me the representation of primordial elements such as air, fire, earth and water. Wherever I looked, I found them in several versions and different forms, with an immense plasticity and representing a disturbing and at the same time fascinating fact - everything that existed was composed of basic elements grouped in a certain way that evolved - from In a very simplistic way, this cosmic dynamic defined the motif and contours of my aesthetic interest - the internal pulse of the landscape - it was a scenario that was basically in a process of change, with roots in the distant past and that would possibly remain, even until after the human race disappeared from the face of the Earth. From my point of view, and from what I was able to see, it was fascinating to watch the “metamorphosis of the pseudo-eternal”, which included any plasticity that could be imagined. Despite appearing inert, there was energy pulsing, immobility was an illusion because on another level there was movement and change that represented the action of an organizing agent that had been acting forever and its matrix was impregnated in every particle of that scenario.

In 2020 we renovated the family house and I created a studio where I started working and in 2021 the first large format paintings appeared. My expectations regarding opening a new line of work became reality because a new series was taking shape and there seemed to be no doubt that the context in which I found myself was the reason for this happening. It was a significant change and I felt compelled to focus on the dialogue between the primordial elements of the landscape and the human references that still remained from the past, such as the ruins of old houses and the mountain shelters that for me represented the nomadic spirit that remained in human habits even when the norm was to live most of the time in the same place, they also symbolized the spirit of the traveler since occasionally these shelters, with the door always open, were a refuge for walkers. Whenever I stood on the doorstep of one of these buildings, imagining that people with very different life circumstances had passed by, I projected onto the rustic stone walls the inquisitiveness of the solitary traveler in search of the solace of the landscape.

 

The interior of the country is a different universe from the coastline where the majority of the population lives, where the best infrastructure existed. In that semi-abandoned territory where I now found myself there is a population void, few infrastructures and where nothing civilizational seems to happen but where it is possible to find silence, where the background noise can settle and where it is possible to see reality from new angles, enter into the beauty and variety of geography, go deeply into the observation of what surrounds us, immerse ourselves in a serious communion with the natural world, where impressions mark the senses in a very vivid way. The area had this specificity; it transmitted another type of sensations that the slow-paced time scale made clearer. There were conditions to believe that the learning of a new way of seeing was underway and when one wants to understand what consciousness is made of, when the focus is on the energy that is transmitted from what is seen, attention is stimulated so that new ideas emerge. To a certain extent this was new, another tone related to the process of interpretation that allowed me to touch reality in another way, that made me grateful for understanding what nature showed itself capable of doing, for its creativity and for the intelligible information that is possible to process and for the possibility of transforming all this into new matter to build a form of expression, for allowing us to be creative, transforming complex impressions of a three-dimensional world into two-dimensional images. It was also interesting to feel the way in which this cascade of information was assimilated by the senses and the resilience of memory in recreating the facts in an intelligible language so that reality has a meaning, to make the freedom of gesture the fuel of intuition, making it the main work tool.

Immersing yourself in the hyper-reality of a varied and extensive context - a lot of information entering your senses, different from what you are used to - living in a clean and lucid mental state, are factors that have an effect that works as an amplifier of sensations, providing experiences that are difficult to forget and that have an excruciating clarity, the result is a great activity of the imagination, which for these reasons, shoots in many directions leaving the feeling that there are more things under the sun than one suspects, this is another important point in the “Ageless in the Raw” series - seeing the world as an immense overlapping of layers that dynamically mix in an internal osmosis - something that had to do with the raw and naked landscape, which lacked the human frame, this hive of characters spread across the terrain always making transformations, interacting with the environment. The raw state of the landscape highlighted this void and my reaction was to fill it with an overvaluation of the dramatic charge of the landscape, mythical facets that symbolized the action of telluric beings imprisoned in the primordial elements, characters that, although not visible, express themselves in the shadows of the Laughable things - a certain group of trees along a waterline, the crunch of rocks, dancing flames of a forest fire, or the roar of water over the polished stones of streams simulating whispers and voices - I was interpreting the organization and the vitality of the natural world as being the result of the intervention of a supra-real entity, beyond reach in the sense of being on another level or in another dimension. There was a vision of reality staged by the imagination that places a symbolic charge there that eventually had to do with human DNA and its ancient records that resolved existential anxieties and dealt with fears. It was the vacuum caused by this lack of people that aroused my interest in an interpretive reading of each element of the landscape and certain combinations that seemed to be the work of an absent sculptor - readings that took the appearance of things through intelligible gestures, as if nature were the work of a creator and not the result of chance or a random chain of circumstances, it seemed to me the only chance to explain this vitality with its perfect balance, which always prevailed over human gesture.

The relationship of the ruins, in particular the mountain shelters, with the notable elements of the landscape - rivers, mountains, the trees in the forest, the sunlight - assumed here as representatives of the primordial elements, was a dialogue between man and nature, between what is transitory and what persists, between what is ageless and what is ephemeral.

The traces of the past were fading, I was witnessing the twilight of an era. There were ruins everywhere and at a certain point I felt like drawing on the walls full of patina that were still standing and which in some cases were full of fungi and lichens, with the tones of clay and hatching in the limestone. I took paintings to the middle of the rubble to see if the tones spoke to this chromatic mix created by time, I entertained myself by making sketches of this mixture of earth and old bricks, of thorny plants that climbed the decrepit walls and I imagined each of these places in the time when there were people in them, when there was smoke coming out of the chimneys and that led me to another interest, the marks that still inhabited the ruins, the old memories of their former inhabitants - broken tables, rusty tools, agricultural artifacts - I went knocking on the doors of the few houses still inhabited to collect testimonies and copy old photos on my phone camera. I heard stories about people who were no longer alive and I got an idea about the hardness of life and the resilient character of people who lived off the land. In my head, a stylized figure of the absent character began to take shape - the caretaker of the fields, father, beekeeper, friend of animals and explorer - this character started to accompany me on my exploratory trips and in the subconscious he was the one who explained to me the details of the land, so there was a narrative that went through the black and white photographs and the associations that I made from the stories that some old inhabitants had told me.

Mountain shelters were spread across the mountains and every now and then I came across one of them, half-ruined in interesting locations with open views over the surrounding landscape. In some cases it was possible to go inside them and see what was still left and then think about the hands that had built them, a job that must have been difficult in such a remote place. Initially, I had noticed these ruins while walking around the surrounding area, especially along the watercourses, and I began to try to understand what they were for, and in most cases it turned out that they were shelters for those who had properties far from the villages. , they stayed there for a few days while there was work to do. For me, the mountain shelters, as I saw them now, became a symbol of absence, the way I found to represent the emptiness of people. In the paintings from the “Ageless in the Raw” series, these constructions are represented in a stylized way, embedded in rocks or sunk in vegetation. They represent the memory that I distilled from conversations and memories of the past and represent the ephemerality of the human gesture in the face of the long-term change that is taking place in the natural world, which is in reality the hand that commands and has the final say, the rest are transitional states destined to be assimilated into the oldest and most “raw” process that exists.