untitled Painting

14, August 1978 Maputo, Mozambique. I like Manet Writing a text to accompany the exhibition of a set of works belong- ing to a particular moment in an artist's trajectory begins, as I see it, with learning, approaching, recognizing that artist's language. Perhaps thought could stand in the place of language in this instance; but I believe that an artist's thought - the way they construct the world - can be understood through their work, rather than interpretive writings or the con- textualization of their practice. This process of repérage, upon which is based the writing of a text on an artist's work, is somewhat anthropophagic: it aims at borrowing ways of seeing, sorting out and experiencing the world. Painting is a pathway for this journey of discovery/exploration of particularly obscure approach. It is an intensely sensorial field, veiled and nearly inscrutable during its execution process. This dialogue becomes more complex when the setting of this moment of execution of the painting does not coincide with the set- ting of the theme approached in it, and when the object, person or subject is not present. All this would be relatively simple to perceive if Eugénia Mussa's recent paintings were abstract (places, sensations, ideas - or the refusal of all of these - found in the act of painting) but, strictly speaking, they are not; they are recognizable landscapes (although their location is only established after the painting process has occurred). The location that is portrayed was indeed found by the artist, first in the painting itself, only afterwards in the landscape; thus reversing the logic of the mirage's optical illusion: the referential for real- ity becomes that of the sensitive plate. And the same might occur to ourselves as spectators, as we participate in her painting; we find ourselves within reality, we know where we are due to the tinted experience of spaces and locations revealed in these paintings. Eugénia Mussa has used color, releasing it from optical and aesthetic the- ories, as well as from its symbolic and semiotic significances. Yet, it is through color that she maps the location, the locality, where to be is to be present (Pessoa). And this place is a place that is permanently being discovered.