Homenagem a Fernão Mendes Pinto 1957

Antonio Areal made this drawing ‘Homenagem a Fernão Mendes Pinto’ with graphite or charcoal, maybe even conté crayon – you can tell by those granular marks which create a rich range of tones. I love how Areal confidently combines abstraction and figuration into something otherworldly. It makes me think about how, as artists, we are constantly inventing our own visual language, sometimes it feels like a lonely pursuit but then you see artworks like this and feel understood. Those dense areas of shading on the left give way to the landscape which recedes into the distance, or perhaps it’s emerging. I bet Areal was thinking about what it means to build worlds with images, how an artist’s perspective changes what we see. It reminds me a little of Piranesi's etchings, those impossible architectural fantasies, where the space is never quite resolved. All artists stand on the shoulders of giants. We are all in conversation, remixing and responding to each other’s work across time.