Água Viva

As it is vital for life, water carries a variety of symbols. She is the force controlled by the Moon, a feminine mystique of Nature. She is the life, the world’s womb, creating and destroying. Generational memory, the archive of existence lies in her flow, the movement of life. Past, present, future.

In my mind my whole life is in water’s possession. She remembers my childhood,  carries my emotions, gives me reflections on what’s passed and what is yet to come. 

Water embodies life's duality, mirroring the existential tension between life and death, creation and annihilation. The cyclical nature of water - through precipitation, evaporation, and condensation - parallels the cycles of life, death and rebirth. 

The Água Viva Series is a summary of moments and feelings to where my mind wanders no matter how I’ve changed. As the water is flowing or changing states constantly, it is still water. You never meet the same person twice. I am moving and I am not the one you knew. But I am the one I’ve always known, who I was at 6 and who I’ll be at 60. 

I remember myself from a very young age. I see these memories reflected in the water. 

“Água Viva” by Clarice Lispector is a novel with no conventional plot nor named characters, framed as a directionless monologue. One long prose poem, a meditation on nature of life and time, a stream of life itself. 

Available for purchase

“Reflecting surfaces”

130*170 cm, acrylic on canvas

2025

I’ve been spellbound by the shadows of trees since I remember myself. Darker shapes of leaves on the scorching ground, like white burned sand where I grew up, are the core summer memories that remind me of my childhood, my home, and peaceful times. The painting encapsulates this feeling, sweet nostalgia of the time passed. Precious memories

“Playing Tag”

130*170 cm, acrylic on canvas

2025

Taking inspiration from Sufjan Stevens, a fever dream scene is depicted, as a childhood memory, a universal experience of playing tag. Elusive movement of the figures as a movement of time, impalpable and will not return. The blurred silhouettes drift like echoes through a fog of memory, their gestures half-remembered, half-imagined. The scene breathes with nostalgia, a tender meditation on the fleeting nature of youth and the passage of time.

“A sound is still a sound around no one”

130*170 cm, acrylic on canvas

2025

Is to be the same as to be perceived? Can something truly exist without entering consciousness? I exist within myself—not as someone’s idea of me, not as a reflection in another’s mind.

There is a conflict: the deep desire to be seen, and the inevitability of never being fully understood. Is there peace in surrendering to that truth? Could peace lie in the silence of not being heard? Might that be the only way?

It’s a difficult concept to grasp—especially with a human mind shaped by interaction. We’re not formed in isolation. If, as John Locke said, we are born tabula rasa—a blank slate—then knowledge comes only through perception.

But perception requires an external world. And if the world exists regardless of our awareness of it, then surely I exist too, even when unperceived.

Still, how did I form myself around no one?

Perhaps true freedom from others’ perceptions—their eyes, their ears—requires that we pass through them first. That to be untouched, we must first be touched. That to be whole in solitude, we must first be fragmented in presence.

“Água Viva”

130*170 cm, acrylic on canvas

2025

wet earth, soil is a mother figure, blending into moss is a form of meditation

“… this “spineless “ writing is not random, or even abstract. Instead, it’s consistency more properly belongs to the realm of dreams, in which ideas and images connect with a logic that may not be immediately apparent but is nonetheless real. This was the writing Clarice described when she wrote in The Foreign Legion, “in painting as in music or literature, what is called abstract so often seems to me the figurative of a more delicate and more difficult reality, less visible to the naked eye” “