Silk Roads

In downtown Rio de Janeiro there are many blue and white tiles over old buildings, which we call Portuguese “azulejos”. For a long time, I thought all “azulejos” should be blue and white, or at least a little blue, because after all, “azulejos” has the Portuguese word for blue as part of its linguistic root. Like many of my fellow countrymen, I found most of the recent ordinary architecture terribly uglier than the ancient one, hence the tiles represented a certain nostalgia.

Back in 2011, I saw an artist decorating the background of her mural with a small stencil that mimicked an azulejo. I began to imagine paintings made of stencil-like tiles, but distorted with volume because I never liked flat shapes. But I never had the patience to cut stencils, and for the level of detail that would make it special, doing it by hand would be crazy.

I discovered the laser cutting technique in 2013 in Berlin, but only started using it in 2015 in New York and Lisbon.

In New York, people looked at my tile-like paintings and asked about Moorish art, about Morocco, whether I was Muslim. It made sense, because Portugal never stopped being kinda Moorish. In the late 15th century King Manuel fell for the ceramics of Islamic Spain and wanted something similar in his palace in Sintra. Even the word “azulejo” comes from the Arabic azzelij, small polished stone, and has nothing to do with “azul”, though it looks like it does. The blue and white came from China, which imported cobalt oxide from Persia because it gave the most intense colour on ceramics. I like to think symbolism is often born from material limitations, and the love for blue may not be what spread it, at least at first. Sometimes it’s hard to know who started what, and why things moved in a certain direction.

My tiles paintings have turned into this series that I call “Silk Roads”, named after historian Peter Frankopan’s book on world history, which focuses on Central Asia. In the first painting of the series I paid a tribute to Dr. Nise da Silveira, because the organisation that invited me to paint a psychiatric hospital in Lisbon, the Urban Art Gallery, asked for a face in the composition — and Nise, a great Brazilian doctor who developed the art therapy field and fought for the recognition of schizophrenic artists, seemed to me clearly the best option.

From GAU, Galeria de Arte Urbana da Câmara Municipal de Lisboa. Most of the photographs are by José Vicente.

Back in Rio, I tried to mix the tiles with my paintings about the daily life of the city.

Painted at Arts Orgs and Local Projects Gallery in Queens, and at the Living Gallery and Little Skips coffee shop in Brooklyn.

Made during a LIBRE gathering, the independent publishers’ association of Brazil, at the Museum of Modern Art in Salvador.

A project gone astray and new meaning coming from failure.

Invited by the curator Ana Vilar Bravo. Photographs by José Vicente and Bruno da Cunha, both of GAU — CAM Lisboa.

In NYC 2017, during the AnnexB residency, with Islamophobia growing and people being barred from entering the US, I did a solo show in which I combined the tiles with Islamic art and invited an Iranian friend, Marjan Fadavi, to write the text for the exhibition.

A collaboration with the photographer Marcos Muzi: my laser-cut stencils, a light source and a long exposure, over São Paulo at night.

Then I applied for a scholarship at NYU’s Interactive Technology Program and started using projection mapping on paintings, as well as going deeper in my studies on algorithmic design and ethnomathematics. Such research became a show with an immersive interactive installation at Babycastles in Manhattan, so I invited Wenqi Li to develop the project with me, alongside Verônica Natividade, with whom I was already talking about algorithmic design pedagogical methodologies that included world references, especially fractal design in Africa.

In the midst of this whirlwind, I got invited to do a huge mural project for Pioneer Works — it was such a pleasure to be able to give my tiles paintings a much larger canvas.

The same stencils, off the wall: canvases, works on paper and prints, where the perspective can be built slowly instead of at the speed of the weather.

For me, to think of history and philosophy is as close to spirituality as I have. It’s about being part of a process, history as human collective intelligence. Even if chaotic and to some extent cyclical. It’s about not creating alone. How we are a continuity of each other, a continuity of nature, of the world, even if we create barriers.

Trying to understand how things are built, to understand even the one that hurts me, gives me some relief from the distressing situation of the current moment. It helps me to have the lightness to think of alternatives — calm down, the world was once different and could change again — to think about human exchanges, their joys, pains and violence as part of a process that I can’t really understand, it is far too complex, but I can at least admire and try to contribute by creating images with what I was able to see. It is an internal need, it calms me and helps me to look with some distance, to have some hope. It is a pleasure to be able to be enchanted by the world, even with its pains, and to return something that I believe has a good energy, a good contribution for others.