Against a background of opaque yet luminous grey, built by the progressive layering of white brushes on the upper left half of the canvas, different coatings of black, grey and red streaks make their way through the composition. Such layering becomes a kind of a dance of stating an image and erasing it. To the right of the composition, horizontally organized as if it were a landscape, a striking red sphere, composed by a succession of oblique strokes and built over reminiscences of a graphic, a rarefied grid structure and illegible written notations, tries to emerge from the background, like a giant ball of fire through a thick fog.

The expressive layering of António Sena's 1980s work shows both the tenacity and humility of a visual practice that uses a method of apparent trial/error. Erasing the past (the first layers), overlapping the present is, in his painting, a continuous practice. Successive coatings of transparent colour create quite complex visual results, and a sense of depth on the surface of the canvas. Sensitive but always indecipherable, Sena's paintings area perfect metaphor for our vain attempt to capture the meaning of life. Overlapping mathematical symbols, handwriting traces, and fast brush strokes of transparent colour layers, thus evoke the continuous stream of time.

Although in those years Sena started using calligraphy as a pictographic element, his compositions did notbecome more decipherable. Quite the contrary. Their mystery remained intact, combined with a vivid and expressive use of colours. The same happens with this painting. Its title - JT3
takes the two consonants from the English word - joint
. However, as it always happens in his work, it does not evoke any concrete meaning, rathera “personal baptism” — as the artist claims.

EF