Practitioner Statement

The science I studied for almost a decade strongly influenced the work I’ve developed in Sculpture, Installation, Photography and Painting. That is also why I’m interested in many ideas that are common to philosophy, art and science, such as: (the 4th) dimension, (im)permanence, Improvisation, Randomness, the Unknown, Persistence, Silence, Intention and Intuition.
The artistic context within which I develop my ideas started with Bosh and Da Vinci. After them a few apparently random 20th century practitioners contributed in both conceptual and visual ways. Probably the most relevant were Duchamp, Kandinsky, Cage, Rauschenberg Tinguely, Rebecca Horn and Basquiat.
For my Sculptures and Installations I work with a method that can start with written notes (usually lists and small sketches) or a group of objects I collect from skips. Sometimes collaborating with friends I develop a dialogue between the ideas and the objects making them as interactive as possible and hopefully inducing a sequence of events in the observer’s mind. “The object” becomes a riddle/catalyst for a chain reaction that starts in me and ends in the observer.
My photographic work is shot in Portugal and is a reflection of the Portuguese past and the consequences that it has in the present. The pleasure of making these images comes from the idiosyncratic traces of irony only a castiço (“indigene”) can find.
Painting changed extensively while I was doing my degree. Probably the media I get most obsessed with is the same one I chose to use only when it becomes impossible to avoid. The main consequence of this was the production of a couple of extremely large canvas conceptually elaborate and painted in explosive colours. All the time I forced myself to hold the impulse made me lose control and obviously feel freer while I was making them.
Finally it’s vital to make clear that the context of my work is not just art historical. Portuguese Poetry (Alexandre O’Neil, Herberto Helder and Fernando Pessoa), Philosophy (Buddhism, Plato, Hegel, Nietzsche and Wittgenstein), Science (Blogglie, Einstein, Bohr, Watson, Crick and Stephen Hawking) and even political worries give me motivation to feed others with the signs that made me who I am.