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.

 

Valadares's repertoire of images divides essentially into two poles, which end up revealing themselves as the same question: empty architectures — corridors, staircases, cells, decommissioned prisons — and uninhabited landscapes, cut by a horizon line that a distant hill interrupts. In both cases, the human figure is absent; what remains is space as the trace of a presence that cannot be seen. Her source images are rarely drawn from direct observation: they come from travel photographs, from records of prison systems published online, from renderings used in real estate advertisements, from screen captures of video games. These images, removed from their original contexts — documentary, commercial, recreational — are translated through drawing, projection, and finally wax, which returns them as something else: denser, quieter, stripped of the function they held before entering the painting.

 

It is in this passage — from record to symbol — that the work's central tension is organized: between intimacy and immensity, between confinement and freedom, between what is shown and what remains hidden. Series such as Carceri and Isolamentos borrow architectures of real confinement — prison islands now converted into tourist destinations, decommissioned penitentiaries — not as denunciation, but as a study of how the same space changes meaning as its function changes over time. In Outeiros, by contrast, the rise of the terrain functions as both obstacle and promise: the hill that blocks the view is also what, once climbed, reveals the landscape on the other side.

 

Within this body of work, titles do not serve a descriptive function. They act as a second layer of meaning, running parallel to the image, and reveal an artist for whom words carry as much weight as color. Painting and title move forward together, and it is in that meeting — between what the image shows and what the name suggests — that Fernanda Valadares's work asks of the viewer not speed, but presence.