The Radical Choice of "Simplicity"
We live in an era of hyper-resolution, digital noise, and academic over-thinking. In this context, my choice of a child-like aesthetic is a radical act. While other artists add complexity to prove their skill, I deliberately strip it away to arrive at an expression of pre-verbal wonder.
My current body of work consists of a series of artist’s books and paintings that explore my third-culture identity.
The Artist’s Books:
• Brazil’s New Agrarian Reform (by Armin K. Ludwig and Harry W. Taylor): A direct intervention into the artist’s father’s scholarly work, bridging American intellectual inquiry with Brazilian identity.
• Exercises in Algebra: An exploration of "unknown variables" within personal history, using the grid of mathematical logic as a scaffolding for color and collage.
• The Lay of Havelok the Dane: A visual meditation on exile, displacement, and the reclamation of a mythic past.
• The Blue and Red Anthology: A study in primary tonalities, representing the dual hemispheres of the artist’s upbringing.
The Paintings:
Houses, stripped down to essential symbols of shelter, and painted in a deliberately child-like manner, serve as metaphors for family. A house might look like a house but it could just as well be my grandmother—sturdy and rooted to the earth. The paintings are essentially self-portraits and portraits of my family.
In Lights On, 2025, there is a sense of the unseen within the house — ghosts of the past moving through the rooms. The houses are vessels that hold my heritage and my love for that
heritage — and posits the question of whether or not one belongs to place by inhabiting a house. In works like Violet Sky, 2025, I introduce a boat to move the conversation toward a larger sense of community and industry.
The Process:
I build the surface of the canvas through heavy impasto, subsequently scraping, scumbling, and veiling the paint in thin glazes. This physical build-up mirrors the act of remembering. In some areas, the "house" is a dense, tactile object; in others, it is a ghost-like outline dissolving into the background.
Artistic Lineage:
The "return to the essential” in my work echoes the lineage of Brazilian masters like Sergio Camargo and Mira Schendel, balancing a rigorous focus on form with a deeply felt humanism. Like Camargo’s intuitive geometry, my "houses" are vessels for safety and nostalgia; like Schendel’s graphic marks, they bridge the void between my North American daily life and the vivid, eternal Brazil of my subconscious.