TRANSIT LOUNGE

Trained both as an architect (graduated from Architecture University of Lisbon, 2000) and as an artist (finished MA Fine Arts, Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam, 2006) the works I produce are investigations on the possibility of enhancing hidden dimensions of space.

This means to acknowledge the relation between the potential embedded in physical space to arouse different/multiple/infinite perceptions of the same space, and our inbuilt mechanisms of perception and assessment of reality; the intricate interaction between both is, in my view, responsible for the emergence of those recondite territories. In other words, I work with the principles of intuition and discourses, which act upon the body in actual space.

Within this framework I have developed the notion of constructive paintings to investigate the potential of painterly representations to challenge architecture, by mobilizing its strength to construct and deconstruct space, both physical space and represented space. Painting has the power to alter/subvert the properties of the built environment: a wall, which is known to be a solid element can be liquefied by means of painting. I work with both painting and constructive materials as media that allow from embodied, to fluid, to barely visible existences; from explicit presence to invisibility.

At the same time I approach painting as a constructive process similar to building architecture, from a two-dimensional design to an object. I explore this issue by defining a process of building images by layering. The layering process starts by defining representations of space (computer 3D images, topographic maps, etc.), developing further until it becomes tactile (painterly surfaces), achieving the character of substance (objecthood).

Painting, more then a form of mimicking reality, renders visible potential realities. It does so in a logic of its own but not disconnected from reality. I see painting as a form of legitimizing the existence of spaces beyond the physical spatiality we might inhabit. The surface of the picture plane works as an independent ontological territory that attests for the credibility of the places I ‘build’.