Series: Houses, 2024 (#21 to #28)

“Only houses explain that there is a word like intimacy” Ruy Belo

The little stick figure house, drawn in colored pencil, a somewhat untidy rectangle with a somewhat triangular roof, lost in a random landscape, with sun and clouds in the background. Next to it is a family of stick figures, with their round heads, waving and smiling and often larger than the house itself.

This is the description of almost every human memory about their first graphic drawings.

The house, the family, the landscape.

Three elements that surround us throughout our lives, and mine as well. Is it possible to go through the human experience avoiding these elements? I don't think so...

It seems like it's always been what we've been longing for: a roof, a sloping roof, a window perhaps open, and friends or family nearby.

This is the starting point of the research and execution of this series. It all started, once again, with a watercolor notebook, where houses that appeared on my real or digital paths began to be registered.

These houses asked for space, left the notebook and began to be grouped into larger paintings, connecting or disconnecting between them, through bridges, passages, stairs, tunnels.

Only them in the paintings, without any mention of the human figures, who certainly were or still are there. Stains in sinuous waves cover what was, or reveal what is to come.

The houses, designed and confused in this way, are a kind of tribute to our greatest search, a safe place in this world, in this existence.

A home should be the basic precept, the starting point of our dignity, but it is increasingly becoming a luxury. For a variety of reasons, from political and social aspects to the increasingly intense consequences of our neglect of the planet, homes are becoming a privilege. Housing is increasingly under threat, making us even further away from that first childhood ideal.

If it is within four walls that we make our most intimate connections, our deepest pains, our best kept secrets and our most precious memories possible, how will it be possible to live without them?

We are not prepared for the slowdown that is increasingly spreading across the world.

These imaginary houses, cities and paths that appear in these paintings can be what was, what will no longer be or what will be. This great “imaginary map” is an invitation to think together, to open floodgates of imagination to new ways of living possible in the midst of “such interesting” times.