Awareness of the body as a whole exists at the moment when one is facing an empty canvas, when everything remains to be done and all the potential of what is to come is still somewhere in a hidden corner of memory, or in another dimension that escapes our senses, where it waits for the opportunity to arise as a result of a happy combination to come to the surface, to emerge on the threshold of consciousness. That moment is the beginning of a process that is equivalent to a shock that shakes the senses from top to bottom and sends them into a frenzy because the whole body is anxious to understand where that energy comes from, so you have to get to work and let it happen. The drawing begins to outline the first clues and then it is necessary to enter into the dance and tune the gestures with the energy that comes from within, that is the engine of painting in its beginnings, puting information in an image in a strange dialect but not a dialect without meaning, there is a meaning, it is a language of gestures that transforms itself into lines and shapes, into color, it is the gray area between what is understood and what is not understood, where each thing has several meanings and is connected with endless possibilities, where there are no limits - this is the generic message - the one that is the basic and starting point for any painting - the notion that every time you look at a work, it will be different in what it reveals - because the time decodes the differences, not time itself but what it does with the experience of reality, what changes day after day - tomorrow we will be different from what we are today - and it is in this difference that art recreates itself and becomes a palpable model of all the greatness of the world, the visible and the invisible.
Time is also important in painting because it extends the process from which ideas are born, it allows us to understand where history comes from, which is essential to understand the present. You shouldn't discard the past just because it's not editable.The present is editable and that's why we like it so much, we can think about doing things one way or another but looking back is useful in terms of making the right choices, experience never hurt nobody.
At a certain stage, the paintings evoked a feeling of the past, as if they had a stigma that made them narratives of a historical time. There was reflected in them a figurative style that showed a version of reality that seemed limited, confined to "dejá vu", almost like a portrait or a familiar quote from an ancestor and this is intriguing because it is not clear why I was focused on something that can no longer be changed. It sounds like a pure and simple waste of time, but I couldn't help doing it. At a certain point I became aware that my representations were footprints on top of other footprints. The path had already been traversed by others, many times. One day the obvious question arose - Is this a negative thing? Would it be derogatory to have your eyes focused on a figurative representation of the world? - After all, art had already ventured far beyond that, but it wasn't that simple, after all, the figurative was loaded with other things and the answer couldn't be that obvious - just because it's already been done, shouldn't I do it? - Being ourselves first and foremost. It was the most natural answer and that's what I went with, hesitating at first but then more convinced that the collective experience was uncontrollable, would certainly be impregnated in the Portuguese, in their DNA or in a deeper memory and that could explain how, over the years, this collective experience influenced literature, poetry and the arts, particularly with regard to people's relationship with the sea, the portal that at a certain point opened to new worlds. Taking this backgroung into account is like having access to a large library, and the way to start deconstructing this library and reformulating the reading of the past is to make knowledge a dynamic process capable of moving forwards and backwards, of assuming a plasticity without complex by any form of expression or any style. Painting is a synthesis that plays with many layers of information and the result is that there is no final form in the message it transmits, it depends on who is looking and therefore the knowledge that one has of painting is dynamic because it has its roots in the flow of time and our point of view changes at every second, that plasticity is what matters most, not the type of image that is used, whether it is more concrete or abstract, more or less conceptual, what is important, is what changes in our consciousness due to what is seen, because there is a permeability in memory that makes perception stop being a pure act, just a narrative of what is there in front of our eyes. At a certain point, knowledge acquires a symbolic quality - the ability to understand beyond appearances - is the sum that results from all experiences, past and future, that somehow acts on the the present. Just because a feeling is not understood, it should not be dismissed as something useless. In painting, nothing is useless, and there is no time wasted when all energy is concentrated on the act of making. Making is all that matters.