Atelier
Lisbon, Portugal. 13.10.2023The image of a Portuguese man o' war baby on a beach. A colourful autumn leaf hanging on a wall. Compositions and rhythms of turned wooden remains. Reproductions of archaic sculptural figures and animals. Jars containing earth. Bowls. Chromatic studies in cotton. Pigments. Saws, chisels, and hammers. The atelier is scattered by collected objects, tools, notes and pictures.
The idea is sometimes encountered in the rays of sunlight passing through a tree while I shelter myself from the heat, sometimes it is stimulated and made to grow according to intuition and research. Mostly memories, sensations, and images are put in front of the material to share its physicality, sensuality, rhythm, proportion, and the capacity for silence.
In the creative process, there are marble samples, wood, mock-ups, vases, gypsum models, stones on the floor. To see everything and really see it by seeking its measure using the ethics of the less and simple. A stone with a brass tube bent by its own weight: not for the sake of the minimum but to discard the superfluous and achieve essence or balance. See, understand, and feel the contracted line of a stem under the weight of the leaf. The nakedness of brass meets in contraction the stem of a potato field seen on a trip to the Azores.
The atelier, understood as a playground, is the
space where the presence of each object is questioned. Proportion, mass,
balance, form, matter, colour. Possible memories, analogies and metaphors. A
free process that leaves sufficient space for surprise.
