Fernanda Valadares's painting begins with a choice of time: encaustic, a technique over two thousand years old, imposes on the artist a working rhythm that stands in opposition to the speed of contemporary life. Pigmented beeswax is heated and deposited in successive layers onto wood, each layer fused to the previous one by heat — a process whose result holds, within the material itself, the time spent to produce it. It is not merely a technical choice, but a stance: the work is constructed slowly, and this slowness is part of what it communicates.