In the universe of social networks and cell phones, thinking about loneliness seems impossible, given the many possibilities of relating to people who are known or strange, remote or contiguous. There is almost a demand, a social pressure so that we always have to speak out about everything that concerns us: work, friends, the plate of food, the affectionate dog, the rain that falls mercilessly outside the window . Everything is shared in a dissolution of the boundaries between public and private that threatens the most intimate territories of our memories and feelings.

 

Paulo Vieira says no. And it resists the incessant flow of information and the anxiety of the eternal present with a superb painting and drawing without compromise. Against the connected, consumable and contented world, the only possible way out is what Garcia Márquez called “a pact honored with solitude”.

 

The artist and thinker knows that all the sound and fury of images of our time mean nothing and that the most important things in life remain on the threshold of silence and incommunicability that the thinker Havelock Ellis defined as “an archaic world of vast emotions and imperfect thoughts ”. Isolation and loneliness are different things and, despite all the difficulties, loneliness should not be understood merely as a pathology, but a search for deeper and more truthful forms of communication, without the mediation of machines and victorious speeches that observe order of things.

 

In the Renaissance, they called this sacra conversazione , a subjective perception that can only be understood on a symbolic level, in the precise choice of colors and their meanings, in the existing signs of a life that affirms its irreducible independence, even if only in psychic and social reality. in the folds of dreams and thoughts. Against the trivialization of life, Paulo Vieira's dream art forces us to confront the tragic, the obscurity and the unknown, where vortex and vertigo are just other names of the same abyss that looks at you.

 

Mauro Trindade

curator