The intimacy of place and the immensity of space (and vice versa)… The immensity of place and the intimacy of space.

La intimidad del lugar y la inmensidad del espacio (y viceversa)… La inmensidad del lugar y la intimidad del espacio.

The first time I confronted a work by Fernanda Valadares, I stood in silence, contemplating that interior architectural space radiating quietude. I thought of the hours she must have spent accumulating, layer by layer, the pigmented wax in the encaustic technique—a process that demands patience and time. Each layer fuses with the previous one through heat, acquiring weight, texture, and depth. Right next to that work, I discovered another: an empty exterior space featuring a horizon line and, in the distance, a hill breaking this line. In that moment, my memory transported me to the Atacama Desert, my homeland, and to the recurrent feeling I experience when I am there. A question then arose: what causes the intimacy of architecture and the immensity of the landscape to meet? Is it possible to find intimacy within immensity?

Fernanda's work explores the paradox between immensity and intimacy, a link that manifests in the human experience of inhabiting both vast exterior spaces and personal, intimate environments. Here, reading Gaston Bachelard's The Poetics of Space offers a key to understanding this connection. In the chapter "Intimate Immensity," Bachelard proposes that the infinite and the intimate are not opposites, but rather poetically intertwined in our subjective experience. The paintings highlight this interrelation, inviting the viewer to perceive immensity from an introspective perspective and to find intimate echoes in open spaces.

Her works represent two poles: empty architectures—built by human hands—and natural volumes such as hills and mountains, which suggest obstructed distant horizons. In the series Fronteiras (2023–ongoing), the artist plays with the concept of geopoetics by exploring the boundaries between geography and poetry.

On the other hand, the titles of her works are of extreme importance to her; she once mentioned to me that she sometimes feels she possesses a spirit "more of a writer than an artist." These titles offer us clues that reveal her creative poetics, showing how she reflects on the relationship of the human being to space, place, silence, and the cosmos. In 2022, Fernanda titled an exhibition El sonido que el silencio esconde [The Sound That Silence Hides], suggesting that even the desert, with its empty and inert appearance, possesses its own sound. Her titles are not mere descriptions; rather, they act as thresholds toward deeper meanings, emphasizing the tension between what is visible and what remains hidden. Several of her works bear titles that reinforce these concerns: Espejismo maio, Espejismo setembro, 23º32'47"S 46º39'2"W, Outeiros, Isolamentos, Carceri, Subverso, Chiama, and A Beira do Vazio, among others. These names evoke not only places and landscapes, but also emotional and psychological states that invite the viewer to slow contemplation—to pause at what might otherwise pass unnoticed in the immediacy of contemporary life.

A significant aspect of Fernanda's work is found in her series exploring the boundaries between seclusion and freedom. In the Outeiros series (2024), she focuses on hills and geographical features that act as natural obstacles, separating territories and imposing isolation. The landscapes she paints, such as Mount Roraima or Corvo Branco, acquire a sculptural quality, reflecting how nature models its own volumes quietly over the passage of time without human intervention. These hills act as barriers yet invite an experience of discovery; in the artist's words: "upon ascending them, the landscape on the other side is revealed, breaking the sense of seclusion that geography itself had imposed." This fascination with the notion of plane and obstacle within the landscape connects to her interest in the tensions between the visible and the hidden, suggesting that seclusion is not solely a phenomenon imposed by human structures, but can also be an effect of geographical configuration.

In the Isolamentos series (2024), Valadares works with prison islands—places that at one time served the function of forced isolation, but today have been converted into tourist destinations, such as Robben Island in South Africa, where the great advocate for peace Nelson Mandela was imprisoned for 18 years. In a way, the artist seems to suggest that space can transform into place through shifts in context and function. Islands such as Georges Island in Canada, Goli Otok in former Yugoslavia, and Christmas Island in Australia, among others, are presented not merely as specific geographies, but as metaphors for the human condition: ambiguous territories where tensions lie not only between confinement and freedom, but also between historical memory and oblivion. This exploration of "prison-islands" further reflects an interest in geopoetics, as the insular landscape invites us to think in terms of borders and displacement—both physical and emotional.

Complementing this, the Carceri series (2023–2024) consists of paintings depicting the interiors of disused prisons, some visited by Fernanda and others discovered through internet imagery. The abandoned spaces she reproduces present themselves as empty architectures, resonating with the silence of her other works; here, however, melancholy blends with a sense of latent history. These uninhabited prisons, which once contained bodies, thoughts, and extreme experiences, now stand as phantasmic spaces—places where time seems to have stood still. The monochromatic palette reinforces the spatial emptiness, triggering in the viewer a reflection on oblivion and the emotional turmoil these spaces once sheltered.

Architectures devoid of human presence lead me to connect them, by way of contrast, to the work of Edward Hopper, whose paintings also explore silent interior spaces populated by solitary figures in melancholic states. However, while Hopper includes the human figure, in Fernanda's works the void is absolute. Silence in her paintings does not merely evoke a physical absence, but serves as an invitation for viewers to project their own emotional states. In this way, the artist's rooms and staircases are not merely architectural; they become emotional places where subjective experience takes center stage.

Drawing from the brilliant thought of Yi-Fu Tuan, humanistic geographer and theorist, the distinction between space and place offers a valuable framework for interpreting these works. For Tuan, space is abstract and open, whereas place acquires meaning through human experience. In this sense, the hills, horizons, and interiors in Valadares's paintings function as spaces waiting to become places through the subjective projection of the observer. The Espejismos series (2022–2024) reflects this interplay between reality and perception, where what we see is merely an illusion concealing the void.

Undoubtedly, this artistic body of work invites viewers to experience intimacy and immensity as complementary states. In her open landscapes, we find the possibility for profound introspection, while in her architectural spaces devoid of humanity, solitude transforms into a form of inner immensity. Thus, the paradox between intimacy and immensity resolves within the viewer's internal sensation, depositing onto each work their own memories, emotions, and mental states.

The title proposed for this text—"The intimacy of place and the immensity of space (and vice versa)…"—captures the duality running through all of Valadares's oeuvre. Her paintings show that immensity does not belong solely to distant horizons; it also manifests in the most intimate corners of everyday space. In the same way, intimacy is not limited to the private or the small, but can unfold as an infinite emotional landscape. As viewers, we deposit our experience into these spaces, connecting the intimate with the infinite, discovering that immensity also inhabits our interiority and that the intimate can expand before us like an endless horizon. Valadares's works, much like the reflections of Bachelard and Tuan, remind us that the world we inhabit is not merely an external reality, but also a poetic construction of experience fixed in the mind—anchors that offer form and contour in the vast and sometimes overwhelming landscape of existence.

The sequence formed by the eight OUTEIROS [2024] proposes an enumeration of elevations along the horizon line: Serra do Espinhaço, Serra do Cipó, Chapada Diamantina, Monte Roraima... all captured as travel records, whose photos are projected onto large wooden supports and transformed into sketches. This configuration reflects another series: the sentence-line of CARCERI [2024], conceived from images of various prison systems around the world found on official prison websites. Blues. A conversation with Giovanni Battista Piranesi's drawings, titled Invenzioni capricciose di carceri. Two composed spatial phrases where inside and outside constitute landscape, depending on the gaze (like that of her faithful interlocutor from other times).

What, after all, would differentiate the landing of our gaze on an uninhabited interior from a desert panorama, both painted by the artist, beyond the differing distances? LA CHUTE DU CIEL [2023], her dialogue with Davi Kopenawa, brings the junction-overlay of the two spheres. The distant horizon outlined in green separates the two fields—sky and earth—and creates the background to receive in front of it, in perspective, the very columns that would prevent the fall: red in the terrestrial realm, translucent as they encroach upon the sky. A certain embodiment of the metaphor. The segmentation of the canvas into frames of various dimensions conveys the idea of movement and the passage of time (of resistance to image capture). And it marks the translation of the (im)possible solution into a poetics of healing, if we consider the text that sparks the work.

Built in a similar palette, the series ISOLA-MENTOS [2024] merges prison and horizon. The set of paintings in varying dimensions and non-linear organization creates a kind of code for island scenarios, using prison-islands as raw material: Goli Otok, Christmas Island, Pulau Senang, San Lucas, Gorgona, etc. Green sky, red earth, and white water. Seen in the proposed layout, they simulate perspective (as if we could view them all within a single frame, an archipelago). But the variation in size is not merely about formal design; it also reflects a commentary on the spatio-temporal alterations of imposed sentences. Here returns the reflection on confinement present in previous works, such as NINGUÉM É UMA ILHA [2022] and MIGRAÇÃO [2014] (or even in CARCERI), as a revisited symbolism to explore the different narrative possibilities surrounding achievable freedom.

Arranged in a straight line, BACKROOMS [2023] presents a labyrinthine path through walls, doors, and corridors, originally captured from a YouTube video serving as a pilot for a thriller-style game. Everything is almost identical and, for that reason, terrifying. In the space recreated in variations of white and beige, some openings give way to the runoff of a green liquid (which coats the concrete labyrinth with a sign of life—its sap? Unsuspected apparitions? Nature reclaiming the spaces taken from it?). Terrifying.

The articulation between the works in the exhibition incorporates several pieces belonging to other series, whose function in the current group is punctuation. A PONTE DA AMIZADE (CHINA-NEPAL) [2015], belonging to the group of paintings depicting connection-constructions, appears as a metaphor for extemporaneous rapprochements, while selected works from ESPEJISMO [2022–2023] offer views of staircases within environments depicted from renders of real estate spaces in online advertising (another connection-construction). Meanwhile, GRUAS [2020] differs in its elaboration from other works, as the photograph printed on rice paper is used directly as a base for the painting (bypassing the projection and drawing stages, as also occurs in LITOLOGIAS [2016–2021]). Finally, a new version of TRAPPED MINDS, whose figurative imagery features barbed wire against a white background, serves as a reminder of what is at stake throughout the exhibition's itinerary.

In perspective, Fernanda Valadares's work traverses a path, both temporally and spatially, that links her painting to both formal research and art as a discourse on surrounding life—from what it is to what it could be (as a political approach). At the boundary of the fields separating figuration from abstraction, she moves in a way that makes her choices crystal clear: always for the minimum, always for precision. Place, displaced from its original context, constantly reconfigures itself. After all, literally or metaphorically, this is a traveling artist who lives in her paintings.