"The Foudation" ; from the "The Visible Soul of the Abstract" Collection / "O Alicerce" ; da Coleção "A Alma Visível do Abstrato"

The city contains us!

Far beyond territorial issues, the city contains our being, it offers itself for our enjoyment, but it feeds and constitutes it. This symbiosis makes the city contain us in borders that are much more intrinsic than those formed by physical or geopolitical barriers, it surrounds us, concretely, by the various variants of mountains and captivates us, abstractly, by the soul.

As the city grows it changes: landscapes and buildings are confused and amalgamated, building a new aesthetic, without abandoning the natural identity. With unique sensitivity, he is able to perceive and appropriate, without any consent, our transformations. And it goes further! As in a Modernist anthropophagy, it swallows us up and exposes the mutation, exacerbatedly, in the form of new emotional postcards that are updated as time goes by. But what changes are visible to our eyes?

As in a passionate and everyday relationship, the changes in the city are tenuous, however the accumulation of these subtleties promotes a great transformation, perceived only by the pendulum viewer, who can compare a “before and after” full of obvious differences, but which is impossible to be perceived by prosaic life.

The city it contains is made up of numerous symbols and references that leave us at ease, granting the feeling of belonging, location, comfort and recognition. But what are the little details that make us feel special about the “outsider”? The complicity between city and citizen is made in the deep perception of the details already ordinary. The transformation of the gaze, towards the deepening of saturated images, allows us to see the invisible. And these blind spots of perception are revealed, with magnitude, in the abstraction of the concrete.