About two years ago, Heron and I crossed each other in a narrow street behind Santa Apolonia station. We were unknown to each other. This event was recognized a month ago, when we started the meetings to talk about O amor e a amizade [Love and friendship], this exhibition. As many times in the creative process, something happens, then you realize. Sometimes you don't understand, but you recognize. As revisiting an old work that starts to make sense years later. Some perceptions are only triggered from a sensory stimulus that transports us to a conscience. In this case, it was going through the same street.

 

Chance animates the smallest parts of the universe:

the twinkle of the stars is your power, a flower

of the fields, its enchantment.[1]

 

Heron paints comets[2]. He has the eye of someone who knows you have to be attentive to what is not foreseen. His propositions in painting start from studies or become tasks - flowers, mirrors, thorns. There is a method in its practice, together with the preparation of the material. Series developed with elements that reference, influence and circulate between them. Brushstrokes that evoke Volpi or the bow becoming the snake eye. In the repetition and transmutation of gesture and form, tensions created on olden surfaces present his work as an organism determined from invisible forces[3].

In Love and friendship, Heron sets himself a challenge. Starting with the choice of tempera and the refusal of his usual phantom colors. To take a risk is to make the path less easy, but it opens other windows. Experimental and intimate, this exhibition is a meeting between relations of his artistic production and affective relationships. The nostalgia, typical of the streets of Lisbon, is accentuated under the gaze of Heron, exploring photography as a language for the first time. Everyday scenes, between a coffee and a cigarette, conversations about soul devotions and clouds of unknowing.

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As in paintings, figure and background can be confused between analogue noise and archaic techniques. Presented with the photographs, his studies leave the place of exercise, showing the process and the interweaving between work and affection, inseparable in the sensitive path that surrounds the exhibition. Applied to the gallery glass, the bucolic landscape of a distant time and land, when Heron accompanied his father through the paths of the Brazilian cerrado. Among the memories that time devours, Love and friendship deals with a vital emotion[4], in the sense of what crosses us and becomes determinant.

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Stars in the dark are potent icons.

Like biblical oracles.[5]

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[1] BATAILLE, Georges. O Pequeno. Sr Teste Editions, 2021. Tradução livre.

[2] Paint comets. Title of Heron's master's thesis, FBAUL, 2023.

[3] DELEUZE, Gilles. Francis Bacon: Logic of Sensation. Orfeu Negro, 2011.

[4] ROLNIK, Suely. Spheres of Insurrection. Sistema Solar, 2020.

[5] PRADO, Adélia. Thoughts at the Window; All That Exists Will Praise. Assírio & Alvim, 2016. Tradução livre.