The Storms are experiments.

The one here is the first of them.

It arose with my move from the city to the countryside

Due to the pandemic.

I left my urban studio in an industrial zone

And started a studio in the countryside.

I occupied the soccer field of a farmstead

And there I began the first Storm with the structure.

Three 7-meter poles buried one meter into the ground with two top bars

3 meters and 20 centimeters long

Positioned like an open book, I attached two canvases measuring 6 meters by 3 meters and 10 centimeters.

From this base, I began to dream with the stars that are the roof of my studio.

What the city took away, the countryside gave back.

First, the stars.

Then, the violence of the weather.

The sun boiling everything every day,

The rain in its intensities,

The violence of the storm winds,

The relationship with the animals,

The insects that landed and walked on the painting,

The birds that landed and flew between the canvases.

A map intuitively formed,

A map I use to locate myself

Not on earth but in space.

A mythical map,

A zodiacal map,

A map of dreams.

12 figures emerged with the daily dances to inhabit there:

Wasp, Tortoise, Flea, Jaguar Shark, Buriti, Minotaur, Pregnant Woman, Sumé, Juana Azurduy, Painter,

Oxóssi, and the Fool.

Once finished, the painting was selected for an exhibition in Brasília

Of the sacred and the profane, curated by Fernando Mota, held at the Karla Osório gallery.

The day before the opening, the painting was acquired by Roberto Klabin.

Roberto soon made clear his intention to install the work at the Caiman Ecological Refuge in the Pantanal.

Almost 5 months after the start of the exhibition, more than a year after the beginning of the work that resulted in the Storm,

the project for the structure that now supports it at Caiman followed.

A piece designed to make the painting retractable on days of rain and intense wind,

which also has a false perch, a wooden structure that rotates when something lands on it.

I installed the Storm last Friday, December 3rd.

The exact location for installation was chosen on December 2nd.

At 7 am on Friday, we began to dig and drive the definitive 7-meter poles

pounded one meter into the ground.

At 2 pm, we began to raise the painting.

The method was a tractor that lifted the parts of the painting already attached to its structure.

By 5 pm, the work was completed with a photo of the team who secured it.

What remains is a visual experiment that dialogues with the Pantanal landscape and its weather, its

animals, and intense nature.

The thousands of birds, insects, caimans, and a thousand other creatures that now enjoy the presence of the painting.

The intense sun, the silvery moonlight, and the sky, sometimes blue, sometimes gray, sometimes studded with stars that

frame the Storm.

What is projected is the renewal of the Storm as time consumes it.

Hence, the Storms in the plural.

There will be another when the current one is gone.