Painting

My painting starts with live drawing. Although the drawing is well defined, it reveals a set of duplications, transparencies and other incongruities that reflect the fact that the people who are drawn are never quiet.  They move, change during the posing time, seek successive positions of comfort, or again, they choose successive forms of discomfort, only to give them up directly.
This discomfort mimics the illusion that the subject builds about the robustness of his convictions that he takes as solid but that he has to be constantly defending against the corrosive attacks of the world. This inglorious struggle is impossible to win, confronting the subject with the imperative questioning of his core beliefs. The idol has feet of clay that will inevitably break.
The figures that are drawn become mere signs of the subjects. Although the original drawings mostly portray concrete people, the objective is not to search for any superficial resemblance but to transform them into generic symbols of a subject relating to others. This relationship symbolizes the struggle between construction and destruction, between the pre-defined and the vague, between categories and indecision.

As an artist both in traditional oil painting and in abstract algorithmic drawing I’m divided between these two divergent fields. Nevertheless the emptiness of obvious meaning is the common ground of all my works. Given my background in engineering and robotics, I seek the dialog of art and mathematics through the conceptualization of the gesture of drawing in my digital works. This is my area of current research in the art field in my pHD programme in Fine Arts Faculty of Porto University (Portugal).