"Golden Heart"
Farol Design Hotel | 2016The colours that Diogo prefers to use are the many colours that give life to what he thinks and to what he feels, to what he lives and with whom he socialises here or anywhere else, somewhere in the world, someone with an inner certainty, in a geography that he invents and cuts out in flowers and hearts.
TEXT
He lives the present, but he also lives the past from where he draws the archetypes he uses and which he calls for example, Grandparents, Minho, North, which he calls primal scream, and that are always included in the colours he uses to express himself, systematically deconstructing the runic letters that the Celts took from the Vikings and brought to this North that he loves so much. And it is with the runic alphabet that Dagar, Isa, Othala, Gebo, Othala wrote Diogo. Because it is in Run, that means whisper but also wise, he who practices the secret arts of magic that Diogo whispers in the horses’ ears, and of life, and then paints hearts and golden thread, like those from the Celtic legend of that druid who seeing his beloved queen’s heart stop, took out the heart of a slave and placed it in that place from where he had taken the queen’s and then sewed it up with golden thread that gave her life once again in order to continue to give birth seven or eight times a year, perhaps the number of languages that Diogo uses in his painting.
And Diogo takes out his own heart and gives it beating with beauty to the runes, he throws it on to the canvas with an objective, a question, a purpose, and especially with the concern of someone who endeavours to understand the beauty that exists in the gesture that he brings with him and that paints what he feels and thinks.
Interestingly enough, the runic alphabet begins with an F and ends with an O, F for filigrana (filigree) and O for Ouro (Gold) that embellish the necks of the ladies from Minho and that Diogo paints in the paintings in this exhibition. And this is how he communicates and brings together what departs from him and comes back to him when he goes in search of the other, that being in him it is in the world that he untiringly covers, in a stunning pursuit of his archetypes and his avatars, who have always and even today have constructed and deconstructed him, like a heart that beats or a flower that opens.
And the expressions that Diogo paints do not have to be faces, hands or smiles, not even souls that pass over the empty canvases but that he grasps to call them oikos, love, tenderness, enchantment in what makes him dream and transcends him.
And it is by materialising the spirit that he succeeds in spiritualising matter, where he shakes off the obvious and is not concerned about putting it into perspective, on the contrary, because only in this way does he find a way to blend beauty with beauty.
José Manuel Arrobas
And Diogo takes out his own heart and gives it beating with beauty to the runes, he throws it on to the canvas with an objective, a question, a purpose, and especially with the concern of someone who endeavours to understand the beauty that exists in the gesture that he brings with him and that paints what he feels and thinks.
Interestingly enough, the runic alphabet begins with an F and ends with an O, F for filigrana (filigree) and O for Ouro (Gold) that embellish the necks of the ladies from Minho and that Diogo paints in the paintings in this exhibition. And this is how he communicates and brings together what departs from him and comes back to him when he goes in search of the other, that being in him it is in the world that he untiringly covers, in a stunning pursuit of his archetypes and his avatars, who have always and even today have constructed and deconstructed him, like a heart that beats or a flower that opens.
And the expressions that Diogo paints do not have to be faces, hands or smiles, not even souls that pass over the empty canvases but that he grasps to call them oikos, love, tenderness, enchantment in what makes him dream and transcends him.
And it is by materialising the spirit that he succeeds in spiritualising matter, where he shakes off the obvious and is not concerned about putting it into perspective, on the contrary, because only in this way does he find a way to blend beauty with beauty.
José Manuel Arrobas