“Saudades”

“Saudade (A Portuguese and Galician word that has no direct translation into English) was once described as “the love that remains” after someone is gone. Saudade is the recollection of feelings, experiences, places or events that once brought excitement, pleasure, well-being, which now triggers the senses and makes one live again. It can be described as an emptiness, like someone (e.g., one’s children, parents, sibling, grandparents, friends, pets) or something (e.g., places or things one used to do during childhood; other activities performed in the past) that should be there in a particular moment is missing, and the individual feels this absence.

 It brings sad and happy feelings all together, sadness for missing and happiness for having experienced the feeling.” A paragraph extracted from Wikipedia.

The paintings in this series have no firm direction, all that occurs on the canvas is spontaneous. I use a mixed medium in most of the artworks in order to be able to pass onto the viewer that sense of vagueness I feel during the “saudades’” stage.

Most of what happens on the canvas is triggered by the state of current social life as it becomes more and more limited to “virtuality” – it seems that technology is taking over – more is happening through the internet than live. It is scary, isn’t it?