From the testimony of our sight then we should rather infer the infinite, since there is no object which doth not terminate in another, nor can we experience aught which terminateth in itself. | GIORDANO BRUNO in On the Infinite Universe and Worlds |

My pleasure is an expression of attention, of gratitude: – Thank you, please come on in.

There is nothing new in this work. There is a huge transformation. I believe it goes hand in hand with a natural maturing, a desire for clarification. This is a large-scale painting, almost entirely  oil on linen canvas. The canvases are around three metres high by two metres wide. They are now vertical skies with a bit of land at the bottom, as if they were just backgrounds, with no one, neither an eye nor a gaze, animal or human. Perhaps they are a reflection of my daily life. The result of what I see from my window in the Alentejo, where I live and work. It started from a reference to Fragonard’s painting “Les hasards heureux de l’escarpolette” (The Swing), where the dramaturgical, theatrical scene is evident, which I dismantle until it is transformed into a place without beginning, middle or end, without a point of view, where the work can be seen from the side, from above, from below. Continuing with the same palette, the paintings are transformed. They begin as I imagine abstract paintings do: at a single point. I unroll the paint as if it were a rolled carpet, the body slowly unfurling. Then I discover things I recognise. Sometimes I go in for a closer look and intervene; at other times I leave them as they are.

In this work I recognise the same physicality as always, the raw and free gesture, but with the addition of the freedom to not respond to anything. It is a work without figurative obligations. In this process of making, I glimpse infinity. A new world for me. This work is about nothing. This work is a portrait of the privilege of being able to create in freedom. It is almost abstract. It is the realisation of a possibility, always creating, forever, and it is the enormous ambition of filling the void with silence.

I remember the contradictory feeling of freedom as I travelled daily on the road between Birzeit and Ramallah in the yellow Ford the mini buses in the occupied West Bank, where I was there free, catching the wind with my European passport in my pocket. And now in this work I’m here, free, painting the sky. It is the contradiction between freedom and suffocation, my freedom and the collapse of humanity.

This work, like all my past work, is not finished, nor do I want it to be. I’m not looking for any certainties, much less finished things. I want the impossible, things without end.

JOANA VILLAVERDE | Avis, February 2024