Benedictus Aritmeticus may have discovered the way to add, subtract, multiply or divide. But he was never able to find a way of measuring the size of a cloud, its shape, a cloud that moves and changes as it moves, such as the gaze of a child avid for peace and freedom as he imagines himself in a better, different World, where he may study fractal objects such as impregnating the senses while in the background the music of John Lennon is heard.

(Baba)

This painting is also linked to the African word Buya which in Mozambique, means ‘return’, ‘go back’ [voltar in Portuguese]. Now, when visiting Lake Volta in Ghana, Diogo Navarro painted children who had been rescued from slavery into which they had been sold by their own parents and who, from the ages of 4 or 5, had been systematically condemned to work in the fishing trade plied in the islands scattered throughout the great Lake Volta. Diogo Navarro experiences circularity, or the celebrated myth of an Eternal Return, going to Africa and returning repeatedly, such as these children who, after they had been rescued go back to being sold again, prisoners of their own history. It was in witnessing this that Touch A Life for Kids and the Associação Filhos do Coração (Children of the Heart Association) opened a shelter where the children are educated and fed, and where art is the most common language because it is universal. Here, the already adolescent Baba and other children helped Diogo Navarro to paint this picture perhaps enabling them to free themselves little by little of their ghosts, where the goddess Fortune had failed to bless them.