Towards Perfection - Shape Six Painting

Since the very beginning of my creative practice I have been interested in recreating vivid inner worlds, which reflect the common human being's essence. My process of work consists of collecting situations, poses, and commonplace images, recurrent in everyday life that, by juxtaposition and free association of thought, awake our emotional memory, our collective imaginary. All the accomplished work emphasizes and questions the expectations and ideals of happiness of our era; it concentrates time and its poetic meaning in a moment, makes eternal what is inevitably transitory, creating a harmony between dream and reality, desire and fulfilment in a compensation of opposite tendencies. Recently my concerns were redirected towards the artistic possibilities in the creation of new ways of being, defying and questioning the role of art in relation to life. After modernism's failure in providing optimism and redemption to mankind, is it still possible to conceive hopeful and idyllic art? Thus the notion of hope became very relevant to my art practice and led me to investigate how these concerns can be significant in an aesthetic context. I became engaged with a need for a shift in attitude in the art field from an unproductive approach towards a sense of optimism and hope through a symbolic and poetic experience. The project "Hope that is seen is not hope, for when a man sees a thing, does he hope for it?" attempts to encourage an improvement in visual awareness - both aesthetic and spiritual - and to share a possibility of Hope. I became aware of how the materiality of the artwork and its distribution are relevant in a practical level to the process itself of sharing points of view. Considering the relationship between the public and the artwork, as well as questioning continually the role of art, its service and success in providing intelligible structures for a new society to come, became an intrinsic part of my process of carrying out and accomplishing my work.