When Nature Returned, chapter 29 from The Works

After learning to see the hidden structures of the landscape, I became fascinated by what happens when nature quietly begins to inhabit architecture.

While my life slowly found new foundations in Portugal, I bought two small houses—one in Tavira and one in Olhão—which I rented out to make it possible to continue working independently. A year later I found my studio in Olhão and, beside it, the little blue house that would gradually become home.

Yet what occupied me most during those years was not the practical work of rebuilding a life.

It was painting.

After the austere landscapes, the sea and the electricity pylons, something unexpected began to happen.

Flowers appeared.

Not as still lifes.

Not as botanical studies.

They seemed to grow into the paintings by themselves.

At the same time I became fascinated by wallpaper.

I loved the way it dissolved the boundary between painting and architecture.

A painting no longer hung on a wall.

It became the wall.

The flowers began to wander through imagined spaces, corridors and interiors, slowly taking them over.

Looking back, I realise they were never simply flowers.

They were signs of life returning.