CONTINGERE

Ironic and passionate stories, summon the contradictions and secret individual memories of a society hidden in domestic environments conditioned by conventional morality. Where loneliness and boredom, depression and joy, desire and perversion, violence and alienation, are unveiled by a pictorial language that resorts to the grotesque, the disproportionate, to a contrast chromatism where the paint is applied in a rude and expeditious way giving rise to unique impact paintings.

As I continue to explore and develop my practice as a painter, the Flesh, Desire, Religion, and Eros are fundamental aspects for my contemplation and study.
The purpose of this exhibition is to show a little more of the work I am currently developing. How do we paint Desire?
“Desire as the subject of painting. The painting of desire. But is it not desire, also, that makes us paint? Does not all painting, all art, stem from an enigmatic, prepersonal need for «blood» rather than consciousness, from an imperative desire, an obscure «artistic will»?
[excerpt from the book Teologia da Carne (A Theology of the Flesh) by Sousa Dias, on my painting]

I frequently make the effort to draw landscapes with just one single colour that bears no relation to what I see.

What I am aiming for, faced with a reality that in its graphic interpretation is quite abstract, is to gauge how lifelike the drawing can be without resorting to the kind of colour which we automatically associate with vegetation or nature. The result is paradoxical in the sense of how we recognise it as a landscape in spite of the chromatic disassociation with visual reality. If the drawing itself is an intellectualisation of the visible, the colour of its lines seem to confirm the possibility of creating an alternative visual reality, through a process of heightened mimetic distancing.