I never find it easy to express in words how painting operates, as Diana Cerezino presents in her solo exhibition Com o olhar; Caminhando at Galeria Plato in Évora. The paintings evade the burden of representation and, before them, an exhausted quest for the recognisable in the abstract field. Exquisitely crafted and filled grids, in an unending range of shades of navy blue and taipa brown, surrounded by the paper tape mask. They are shaped by the thickness and expression of the acrylic paint’s material quality on linen or cotton surfaces. Each one contains a complexity; signs and words that I quickly learnt to grasp with my eyes. I would like to emphasise from the outset the proposal’s pertinence: these paintings are not meant to be interpreted, or even read. They are like a changeable luminous event, or even malleable to the same light that both breaks with the day and fades with the night.

It is becoming increasingly unusual for an art critic to genuinely embrace the experience of the work and the condition I was in when I attended the exhibition. That is what I am addressing. If we briefly put aside the “very old clothes” and enter the gallery naked, we can see that this is not just the outcome of a well-crafted optical exercise by Diana Cerezino. There is no visible difference in formal qualities: squares on grids, but, if we look at how each square is made here and there, at the shape of this unit, then everything changes. Indeed, evoking the gerund tense is a case in point. I’m trying to illustrate that the metric, the key (previously established) appears to produce waves and waves, breezes and gusts in the specific reality of each small square that makes up the paintings. This unity is seemingly ecstatic, but, with enough attention, dedication and contemplation, we soon become aware that there is something quite particular and fleeting about each painting. This means that the homogeneity of the unity breaks down under the light. It truly is a crossroads.

Having visited the exhibition Com o olhar; caminhando, I considered how, when looking at Diana Cerezino’s paintings, it is essential to adopt a rounded view, in the gerund, – typical of the Alentejo-rooted indo (going) – which requires a fine-tuned sense of attention. Attention as the rarest and purest form of generosity (Weil, S. 2004, A Gravidade e a Graça, p.116-123) to contemporise difference in an increasingly intolerant contemporary world.

I realised from Diana Cerezino’s paintings that their construction is perhaps not that different from the Pythagorean silence of the blue hour. I immediately remembered a conversation between two young women in the film 4 Aventures de Reinette et Mirabelle directed by Éric Rohmer (1987). In the extract L’Heure Bleue, Reinette uses the following example: there is no silence like that of the countryside for a person living in a big city. They long for it, they dream of it. However, for those who live in the countryside, this silence is nothing more than a buzz: cats sauntering, night birds chirping, insects humming, trees creaking in the wind. If the silence of the blue hour is not about these whispers of a lingering nature, what is it about? The edge of dawn when, in a fraction of a second, we can witness a terrifying silence and feel nature holding its breath. Both the painting Terra (2022) and the painting Pliable – Maleável (2022) are stark demonstrations of how they reproduce or simulate this event as daylight shines down on them. Interestingly, all the titles point to gestures related to tending and caring for a piece of land. Gestures, behaviours that point to something forever and always. The second, in the painting Pliable – Maleável (2022), seems to point across the edge of the canvas grid, towards continuity.

We should therefore celebrate the instances that agree on a point of view and a meeting point that allows natural things to be acknowledged and bound together and that, in a way, add to the apparent transitory condition of each of Diana Cerezino’s paintings. Ultimately, the “connection between the eye-lens (scientific) and the eye-observer (contemplative)”, as the exhibition’s curator Frederico Vicente puts it, are not instantly different and the similarity is related to the practice of attention as listening to the world, but also as action, so as to keep the purpose of looking alive and sound. Sophia de Mello Breyner Anderson translated this exercise into a poem that reads: “My interior is an attention turned outwards / My living is listening.”

Until March 15, at Galeria Plato, in Évora.