Paulo Robalo positiones himself as an attentive observer, a painter of Western culture, who with a redoubled seduction seeks in a process of research and formal experimentation, to register very specific moments from other cultures. Starting always from another point of view, he seeks in the expression of other cultures for the translations that are familiar to him and that refer to spaces that he inevitably identifies - the area of scenic representation and the installation.

The human condition, based upon doubt, anxiety, conflict, the glorification of life and the celebration of death are a refering script to my painting project. It is therefore upon this complex and contradictory background that I try to create and tell stories of decisive moments of life, representing the body/space and the memories of past and, in a subliminal way, future lives.

The man introduces himself to the viewer's eye as a showcase of his interior. He becomes the central element of the representation space – both the actor and the place for this almost dramatic tension. A character who transfigures himself and gets transfigured, redrawns and is being redrawn, invents or is invented whose fate will always be unrevealed. The subject, the existential object, and the central piece of an unwritten play...

This human figure deployed in an imaginary space of representation, painted from a recipe consisting of a wide range of materials, by a mix that confronts the transparencies introducted by encaustic velatures with the opacity and the volume of successive layers of strong chromaticism materials, apparently prevents the viewer from an in-depth reading, not preventing, but rather suggesting, its projection, the (re) cognition of an inner "turned off".

The central protagonist of this plastic process is the man.

Paulo Robalo