«Saudade» is a Portuguese word that other languages lack. It names the longing for something one has never known, the lack or the blurred memory of what one may once have had. It is not envy. It may be a forgotten past, a golden age lost to historicism but cherished like a DNA, like a hazy dream.
At the end of 2016, white supremacy and nationalisms return to the front of the stage, and one wonders whether the spirit of colonisation and the denial of other cultures ever really went away. The series takes the opposite path, the one the modern painters took a century ago when they learned from African art: the faces are painted flat, like masks, in homage to the impact and the beauty that Western painting inherited from that lesson. The series begins with photographs, transcribed into painting by the confrontation of plastic languages.
The minimal, flat style that carries most of the expression is set against the volume of the bodies, which swings between delicacy and exaggeration. The figures are mostly women, and mostly nude: the series shows many female bodies, in reference to matriarchy and to a natural beauty that inspires it.
The backgrounds often suggest hazy, romantic spaces. Some details mix the ages to rewrite a free history: a history that does not belittle nature, nor the importance and intelligence of its past; a history without sexual channelling, without the falsehood built into the cities, without slavery. A history set in a cyclical, eternal time. In short, a lost paradise, and its lost creatures: the moonsters.