Pedro Sequeira (b. 1976, Cinfães, Portugal) works under the principle of the autonomy of creation, that is, under the premise that creativity corresponds not only to the productivity of the imagination, but also to production. In Sequeira’s work, the conception of this creativity arises in moments – and with elements – of everyday life. It erupts from landscapes, materials, plasticity and the possible complicity between these components and the artist. While he rejects the automation of creative processes – in jewellery he refers to production, and in drawing to the homogenisation and sanitisation of the gaze – he strives to construct a plastic and pictorial narrative of what surrounds him, with what surrounds him: his parents’ house, the biros, the materials, the minerals and the banal pieces he paints – such as chimneys – or with which he designs his jewellery.

Whether it’s painting, drawing or jewellery, you’ve said several times that your creations are opposed to the current processes of technological development which, in art, are inherently instigated by the ‘aesthetics of the smooth’^[1]. Why and how do you distance yourself from these processes?

There are various aspects of the artistic field to think about and the problems it presents in contemporary times. Some aspects are shared between painting/drawing and jewellery, and others are distinct. Technological development doesn’t affect painting because the means are the same as they have always been, the material that makes it up is still the same. But it does affect jewellery through production processes where an artist quickly takes the place of the designer when he operates a computer program to obtain results based on concrete parameters, or when the result of the materiality of the object produced is obtained through a mechanical process. This gesture unleashes the relationship between the eye and the hand, a game between the two where things happen, the most important symbiosis when experimenting with possibilities. This way of working isn’t wrong but, more importantly, it’s not my way of working. And above all, I don’t understand the need to do things this way, unless the aim is to produce quantity, and here another discussion opens up. My lexicon doesn’t include concepts such as collection or series, each object is an object and each painting is a painting. But making the same piece in another way is interesting and painting the same painting in another way is interesting. It’s uninteresting when the work becomes a product or when there’s no leap between one piece and the next. Repetition is tiring, it’s the place where there’s no impetus, no energy.

I think my work relates to where I am and the things I encounter. My character is reactive, so I would say that what I do is a reaction to the places where I am, conversations, material, and the way I do it is a direct, open gesture (accessible to the other). This last aspect is visible in jewellery, because anyone can make it the way I do and the understanding of how that object took shape is total, and that interests me.

In your paintings there is a certain formal untranslatability, which dialogues with a narrative clarity. Similarly, there is also an abysmal variation between the use of biros and oil paint in the realisation of these paintings. Do you want to talk a bit about these choices, of formal simplification and technical complexification?

I choose the materials, oil is my favourite, but some oil paintings look like they’ve been painted with gouache. I like dull, lacklustre surfaces, faded tones, overlapping and contamination, oil gives me all this.

There’s a certain happiness or satisfaction with materials and colour. You’re always looking and noticing something, as if taking notes. And some of these elements last a long time in the memory, I can use them again and again. The biros has to do with a practical aspect, of being able to occupy myself with a drawing even when I’m out of the studio or travelling. Drawing time is a time used both to look and to get to know myself, there’s a constant reflection between what I’m seeing and what I’m translating onto paper, the way I do things, discovering things as I go along. On the other hand, I like to use the biros as if I were using oil, superimposing colours and integrating the elements into a composition.

The narrative in paintings and drawings has become important, it’s perhaps a selfish act on my part, connecting dots where the actor managing those dots is me, a classic idea about the artist’s universe. But it could also be a reaction to an artistic practice that is academic or discursive about modern-day social issues that don’t interest me in my work. I came to painting late in life and it’s not easy to talk about painting. I’m interested in a situation that isn’t obvious, where the plasticity of the paint, which is often liquid and dull, contributes to an ambiguous result. In my practice, painting generates many moments of tension, the constant abandonment and return to the same canvas, just as it energises me to find solutions to what I see as a problem. I recently moved studio and put a painting on the wall that I’ve been working on for over a year and thought about making some changes. These are small steps, long decisions between drying times and doubts.

Throughout your career you’ve often confronted and correlated jewellery and painting. You say that one informs the other. Can you explain how you think jewellery informs drawing? Just this year, at the 30′ Kremnica International Art Jewellery Symposium and other media, you also took part with some paintings. Can you talk about this liminal position?

The universe of my work is the same in jewellery as it is in painting, they speak and show the same things and yet they are very different things as objects that inhabit the world and the way they are seen. This is interesting, working three-dimensionally, with many materials and technical approaches, and painting where the technique is the same, but constructing different scenes. I don’t make preliminary drawings for my jewellery work, here the drawing is incapable of presenting solutions. On the contrary, it’s in the direct approach to the materials that the solutions appear, there are aspects that reveal themselves and yet my jewellery work contains a lot of drawing in its construction. I believe in the idea of contamination, where certain things pass into others and influence others. If there’s a result that interests me, I’ll explore it in another way and the work is a continuous, never-ending dynamic. I don’t work in projects or with parameters, and a subject can die when it has to, because I never know what I’m going to do next. In Kremnica, as in other residencies, I made jewellery and drawings because it’s natural, it’s my everyday work. In the same way that, since painting, I’ve stopped working with media other than jewellery, these two practices have become something natural, essential to the way I live.

I can see in your creative practice a certain obsession that pursues and exhausts the spaces you inhabit and the surrounding landscape – almost like an auto-ethnography, or an affectionate anthropology of place. You meticulously scrutinise the various possibilities of looking at the place – the various angles, lights, times and practices that inform you about it – so that there is no blank space left on the paper. What do you recognise in this process? Is it part of the creative will or the place?

There’s something obsessive about drawing, I have a lot of friends like that, even more obsessive than me. I think it has to do with what I said before, that drawing time is time well spent. There’s no boredom when you draw. Apart from the challenge of doing it and seeing the scene emerge, it’s a bit that I take from there to another place, where I can look back and remember things, review the way and aspects of drawing later on.

I studied photography in Porto, which I abandoned for good after painting. I think this says something about myself and my choice of mediums and how relevant the mediums I work with are to me.

When I draw the same place more than once, it’s because I’ve come back and there are new situations and because it’s become relevant in some way. And at different times, the mood varies, more or less availability, more attention to a certain detail. It’s also a way of unfolding the memory and emphasising these references. Places are inevitably linked to a creative energy and perhaps it’s an opportunity to use these places to experiment with a drawing, a painting, and then something happens. New questions open up.

What is your starting point for creation? Apart from the relationship with the places and practices that surround you, is there any conceptual, technical or material research?

There is no prior conceptual or technical research. I don’t believe in that practice. It’s difficult for me to write a project for a residency or grant or anything else, unless I write that I have no idea what I’m going to do there. I believe that work accompanies me wherever I go or wherever I am, most of the time I’m somewhere because of work, but even then I feel available for whatever comes my way. I don’t plan what to do next and, at any moment, something grabs my attention. That’s the signal. The rest boils down to reacting to what appears on the medium, often with surprises, the interesting part, and letting myself go without preconceptions. I studied and live and work as an artist to be a free man, it’s a non-negotiable condition, because I have a limited life span, like all of us. I want to make my time a constructive time, where I’m discovering new things rather than following issues of the day, parameters or restricting my work to serve something else. My longing for autonomy, that is to say my intellectual freedom, is embodied in the independence of painting, drawing and jewellery as disciplines.

What directions do you consider for your artistic output? You sometimes focus more on painting, other times on jewellery – in the future, do you anticipate any aesthetic, ethical or formal priorities taking over your creation?

I never make plans. Everything happens at once, like a palimpsest. I feel, most of the time, as if I am at the beginning, starting something, as if I am leaving behind what has happened and moving forward with will and courage.

^[1] Han, Byung-Chul, Saving Beauty. Translation by Gabriel Salvi Philipson. Petrópolis: Vozes: 2019.