VAIVÉM

VAIVÉM invites us to dive into the enigmatic psychological space of the paintings of Portuguese artist Francisca Pinto. It is an inner world, complex, full of secrets and hideaways. The paintings depict private scenes between people, imagined pasts and dreams. There is an element of surrealism or strangeness that evokes a certain perversity or suspicion. A dialogue between the inner and outer worlds, blending elements of nature and fiction, reflecting the interconnection between psychological space and the physical environment.

People hidden behind curtains or trees peer out, and we, the spectators, also feel implicated, as if we were hiding under the dining table, seeing other people’s feet, or crouching at the level of ducks and chickens. The paintings thus present a child’s perspective of the world, as if someone had gotten out of bed in the middle of the night and caught their parents arguing, listening from behind the bannister. This world is sometimes playful, other times a little scary, like seeing a boyfriend with another girl through the café window.

The exhibition itself invites us into this intimate space, the child’s bedroom, the baby’s skin, the bellies touching one another or peeking out from under shirts. There is a kind of physical contact that touches and retreats, a vaivém between who I am and what I show, how much I give of myself. The contrast between the inner and outer worlds is visible in the light colours, electric tones, and heavy shadows.

The integration of shadow in the representation of psychological space is crucial, representing a part of the unconscious that contains denied and repressed aspects, including undesirable impulses, painful emotions and unpleasant qualities. There is also a notion of time, the vaivém of life and the canvas itself, processing difficult things, dreams, desires and disappointments. The vaivém of the brush marks the time and creates rhythm and movement, conveying subjective experience.

And so a painting happens, a temporal event. As the poet Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen used to say, ‘A poem happened to me’; these are the things of life. Because life is a vaivém of things that happen, going back and forth. And here we stay, watching the time pass. Paintings happen because, like life, they are a dance, a balancing act between feet, back and forth, seeing things move, sometimes being created, sometimes undone, and the painting resolves itself.

For Menez, the painter adored by Francisca Pinto, painting is like accumulating moments that unfold and develop over time. Like Menez, Pinto avoids giving a fixed narrative to her works, preferring to keep them in constant motion. We sometimes find a crow, other times a mirror, reflecting the importance of time in organising psychological space. Memories, expectations and future projections add complexity to the emotional world, shaping our perception and understanding of reality.

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Mariana Lemos