Fernão Cruz, an artist for whom art and life are inseparable, develops a body of work in which biography and individual experiences are the basis for exploring personal concerns, traumas and desires, and for reflecting more generally on the way in which psychic, emotional and physical states are produced and influence our perception and ways of acting in the world. Materialised through various media (painting, sculpture, installation), his works are executed without prior formalisation according to the unpredictability of the mental and physical action of the making itself. In his pictorial practice, this process is reflected in the accumulation of matter and images on the canvas in successive layers, with each work coming to contain several “paintings” within itself.

This painting was produced in the context of the exhibition project - Morder o pó
, presented at the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation in 2021, which was based on the artist's formulations around death and absence (thus also summoning their opposites: life and being).

The abstract background is marked by monochrome, in an intense blue and black palette, and by the division into two sections: the upper square and, below an apparent horizon line, the suggestion of a solar disk emanating rays, in an almost childlike design. In this dense, textured space of representation, fragments of more or less recognisable figurations stand out, giving the scene a somewhat dreamlike and existential character. Taken up with greater or lesser recurrence in other works, these elements are signs of Fernão Cruz's pictorial vocabulary. Like other works by the artist, this painting is not intended to be descriptive or to refer to an immediately discernible meaning, but rather to open up a whole allegorical and interpretative universe.