Fernanda Valadares's painting begins with a choice about time: encaustic, a technique dating back millennia before Christ, imposes on the artist a working rhythm that runs counter to the speed of contemporary life. Pigmented beeswax is heated and applied in successive layers onto wood, each layer fused to the one before it by heat — a process whose result holds, in the material itself, the time spent producing it. This is not merely a technical choice but a position: the work is built slowly, and that slowness is part of what it says.