Stuck Inside

               The concept for this piece was drawn from the ideas I was coming to grasp of the great Descartes when I understood that "I think therefore I am" was not just a phrase, but a truth expressed in its simplest form. There is no real proof of life outside one’s mind, a dream seams to the dreamer just as real as what we call "reality". The fact of the matter is that the two (dream vs. reality) are indistinguishable. If you can’t know your dreaming while you are dreaming, neither can you know you are "living" when you "awaken". The external universe therefore becomes a fib which we must learn to deal with. As Jorge Wagensberg once said, the only way to escape this truth is to learn from the external lies and re examine the contents inside your mind, therefore branching out from inside out. Growth is only possible in that way, though it does imply a contamination from a state of true awareness from within to a state of corrupted ideas. The only thoughts that exist to my knowledge are my own, the only real thing in life is not palpable, nor is it possible to make it concrete. You can only learn to deal with your thoughts if you truly understand that it is all you get to own in life. M. Scott Peck once explained that when you are born, you believe that the movement of your limbs correspond to the movement of the universe, that the sounds you make or the hunger you feel are sounds and feelings of the universe. It is only with time that you begin, as a baby, to realize that your yearnings belong only to you, universe aside. Learning to differentiate and separate your self from the external world is something we understand at a young age, but it is only through reflecting upon life that one begins to understand just how this difference applies.

                   You are your thoughts and nothing else. This all, of course, applies only to me. You I don’t know, I’m not sure you exist. I spray painted the phrase "I’m stuck inside my mind and I can’t get out, help, S.O.S." on the canvas because no matter what, I will only see life as my mind allows me to. I will only understand, feel, think, perceive and, finally live, as my mind allows me to. I can’t take a vacation from my thoughts, there is no escaping; I’m stuck inside my mind and I can’t; I will never be able to get out.

Scrap

                          The concept for Scarp came to me after my trip to Pekin, where I felt the exploitation of life had really sunk into me, when I finally saw for myself how western capitalism had completely corrupted the entire cultural and social life of the young workers in communist China. I expressed my thoughts onto this canvas, using mixed media, including Chinese newspaper, which I painted over with Chinese ink, and I spray painted the U.S. dollar sign as well as the word fake, in all capitals. The use of graffiti is a very aggressive technique, allowing my emotions to make a strong statement. The mid section of this painting is completely dark, creating an ambiguous and abstract image of dirt, of sadness. The important thing to take from this piece, as a viewer, is not necessarily the thoughts I plotted onto it. I would rather the observer contemplate it freely, and make his or her interpretations from the totality of the image here created.

                                                                                  Crammed

                         The concept for Crammed came to me when, after having saturated my mind with the ideas of the great philosophers, thinkers, scientists and sociologists, I felt that I had finally reached my limit, as my mind created an intelligible conglomerate of all I had learned. In graffiti, I spray painted the sentence "Science can’t predict the future, what do you believe? It’s all in your head. Blow it out of proportion and blow it up. Nothing’s real." I titled the painting Crammed because not only is the phrase consuming the entire limitations of the canvas, but it was an expression of the ideas that had crammed up inside my mind, and it was a way for me to blow them all out, and relieve my mind from the saturation which had previously frustrated it. Though it is a very visually graphic piece, Crammed stems from many concepts, all summed into one; here, what you read is what you get. The viewer may not understand what it means, but before such a phrase, I doubt that indifference be the result from its contemplation.

Grounded

                     The concept for this piece stemmed from the feeling I fell into after a very difficult breakup where for a couple of days, a period in which I felt lost and was left to pick up the pieces of my life that had gotten lost inside the bond we had created. The moment "our we" become "my me", it was necessary to identify the things that had come to mesh from the period of passion, where I gave some of me and took some of him, and disconnect them forcefully from where they had gotten feathered. When a change of this nature occurs, you have no choice but to become grounded; back to reality. Back to the only reality that exists; you. Like I have stated time and time again, I believe Descartes’ "I think therefore I am", and just like that, love, as any emotion you can feel, is, in my opinion, just in your head. Your emotions don’t leak out of your framed carnal body, it only spills itself through your interior, and for some amount of time, it may even consume you. This aggressive power of emotions was graphically stated onto the canvas through graffiti writing, where I state the phrase "It’s all in your head, enjoy love while you can". The piece itself is just as visual as it is conceptual.

Rust

               Rust is a piece which represents solitude and stillness, inner piece in the midst of a violently chaotic world. Obviously influenced by Pollock, I tried to create through my subconscious feelings, strokes which evoked madness, rage and anguish throughout the entire background, which represents the exterior world. The splatters were done in a vertical position, the canvas stretched out on the floor, while I was standing on a 2 meter ladder throwing acrylic paint and letting it splash across the canvas while letting my mind unravel on its own.

              The figure here is deformed, very humanlike, but still its shape is ambiguous and eccentric. This was done intentionally, I wanted there to be a sense of empathy with the figure, though the figure itself was not familiar to the viewer. This occurs in everyday life. We might find that our connections to others relay not in our ability to comprehend or even formally know the other, but by understanding what it feels to feel that certain solemnity, that even though we are surrounded by human beings day and night, we are, essentially alone. This figure, ambiguously drawn into a near recognizable figure, draws the viewer in by it’s captivating silence, stillness and lonesomeness. The red background is vibrant, violent, and it demands the attention which the figure, in contrast, seems to almost reject. Here, the shouts scream out for silence, and the silence sits still, in the midst of all the chaos.

                                                                                Traps

            This piece represents the need humans have and often neglect of feeling free and unleashed. In capitalist western civilization, one's occupation often forces their own needs and wishes to be pushed aside and priority is given to the "money making" part of his or her life. On a daily basis, this ritual can drain one's spirit, it can cause accumulated stress and the neglecting of one's desires can often cause self resentment and some sort of anxiety which can manifest itself in different ways, be it in psychosomatic or physical illnesses . Many socialists have examined this fact even in the XVIII century, including Edmund Burke, who extensively explored this issue in his published A Vindication of Natural Society: A view of the Miseries and Evils Arising to Mankind. In a fast paced society, it can be hard to escape and free oneself and live the life we dream of. 

          In chinese ink over an acrylic background, I painted a man, wearing a business suit, grasping a barbed wired fence, trying to escape this reality; trying to find himself after having been buried in a demanding society where, sadly, our human needs, wishes and desires are hardly met and where the most important things in life, the free things are neglected and put last on our list of priorities.

                                                                               Rhizome

               This piece, painted in 2005, after reading the book Rhizome, Which explains the theories of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari explaining that all elements in life are not ordered by a hierarchy, but in a model much like a nest, where each individual part relates to another, which relates to another, and so forth, much like a nest of elements, rather than a list or a pyramid. I explored what I learned from the book, and painted on a large scale canvas loops formed from one single stroke, a continuous line which curves and crawls around the canvas forming a communication between one visual and the other.

               The painting came about after I had a surreal dream in which many ideas floated freely, but were one with each other; a dream where every individual thought guided me through to the next, until I awoke, and realized that though the dream said nothing in particular, it left one single mark in my mind.

             The idea that everything is connected is a valuable idea, and I too believe that it should substitute our desire to classify everything into a hierarchal form. 

                                                            

                                                                    The Timid and the Tiger

              This diptych represents the two sides of each person. Some believe in the multiple personality disorder condition, though some scientists and psychiatrists have often tried to prove this disorder to be fake, non existent, however, this theme is completely irrelevant to my piece. I do not speak of a medical disorder here, instead, I explore the different facets of each human being. We are one, yet our minds work differently in each environment, setting, and even with our many different moods. I believe we are all split, that although we constitute one body, our mind is so infinitely complex that we are layered by different personas all very distinguished from each other.

             The Timid and the Tiger support this philosophy in that they are both distinguishable by their expression, one lady looks like a a crouching tiger about to hunt down her pray, while the others' expression shows a timid, and shy personality, the complete opposite of the first. Although these are two separate pieces, hanging on the wall, they represent one. One divided into two, but still in union. Like good and bad, they are two sides of one coin, a ying and yang, they sustain each other and only through this system can one truly be. I believe this to be true of every person on this earth. As Doctor Yalom explains in his book Love's Executioner, the depth of each human being is so complex and layered that we can never truly know another, nor can we ever really comprehend ourselves.

                                                            Tamed N.1, N.2, and N.3

               These three pieces make up a series where I wanted to explore Pollock’s uncontrolled despair to reestablish the "stroke of the artist" and the expression left by subconscious behavior. At the same time, I wanted to contrast that concept with the concept of controlling the uncontrollable. I formed figures onto the canvases, each painted with a different background color, and splattered the paint much like Pollock would have, but aiming at a target, in this case, aiming to form a figure, by ironically using a formless technique. I wanted to blend an attitude with its exact opposite, a hypocritical work of art, a statement of contradiction. Each figure from the three paintings in this series is different, but they all share one thing; they were created by my sub consciousness and consciousness at the same time. Something many philosophers and psychologists would deem impossible.

Divine

               The formality of this piece was completely influenced by Warhol’s principles that the simpler the image, the more repetition should be used to enforce it and reinstate it. The whole idea of exhausting an image until you are left with its essence is to me, a fine point, and one I felt I wanted to explore here.

              I titled the piece Divine because the lady in the photographs is my grandmother, a woman I have only heard of, and divinity is to me what sums best my perception of her and of everything she represented in her life. I took a photograph my mother had of hers, and photocopied it in many different machines to get the different tonalities. Sometimes, I would copy the copy of the copy, so as to crumble down the image, driving it as far away from its original print as possible. I did this because I felt the idea of time needed to be established formally somehow on the piece to emphasize the obvious past nature of the image. The photograph was taken in 1928, on the day of my grandparents’ wedding, a date which we can visually detect roughly by the image itself. There are some copies of some photographs that have been ripped, which I intentionally did to give the piece a disintegrated hint; Just like her divine existence, we and everything around us is inevitably perishable.

               As Roland Barthes stated in his book Camara Lucida, your body, your bones and your essence, with time, will disappear. The same is true of your children and your grandchildren, and so forth. The same is true, then, of your memories, the ones you created and the ones you held on to. The same is true of any proof of your existence. Time, the world’s slowest and most efficient eraser, will consume everything eventually. Just as your body and those of your grandchildren of generations to come, your photographs are biodegradable; they will perish forever and leave noting behind. This piece is not only of huge personal value to me, for it is a portrait of my grandmother on her happiest day, but it is also a very conceptual piece, one which speaks of time, generations vanished, and most importantly, to the intolerable fact that all we can look forward to for all eternity, is the past.

Mingled

                This piece is a conceptual self portrait. Having lived in so many different places, I have fragmented my life in different worlds and spaces, left bits of me and of my childhood in countries I may never go back to. I consider myself a blended web, standing without a solid base. I have a Brazilian and British passport, as well as a U.S. green card, but I am neither Brazilian nor British, nor American. I am a mesh; I have been fragmented and put back together like a puzzle. Unlike most people, I belong nowhere.

               This piece was created from strings of different colors, rolled up into squares. Each color represents a culture, a common social background. The strings are rolled up into squares to emphasize the order and structure of cultural science. On the bottom right of the canvas, there is a chaotic looking mesh of strings, laying formlessly on its own, separated from the ordered squares above. Closely observed, this mesh is made up of all the colors of strings on the canvas, but blended together so to have no color itself. Its identity is what it is; a mixture of different solid structures which create a completely frail one, all on its own.

                 The analogy is simple once you understand the concept, but visually this piece offers a kind of ambiguity which I find playful and important all at once; the viewer may just as well find it interesting and visually stimulating as he can look for and find the analogy hidden behind. I find that ambiguity is the most important thing in art; it leaves the viewer to draw his own conclusions and opinions. Whether we artists like it or not, our viewers may or may not take the time to analyze the concepts behind our pieces. And this to me is fascinating. We can’t change the world, but we can play with what we have. This piece looks playful, original and visually stimulating. But behind all that is the layer of intense reflection I went through, a hidden introspect for myself and only myself.