My Father 1937

Carlos Botelho painted “My Father” with oil on canvas. It’s all angular planes and muted colors. The artist’s father sits for the portrait in front of a piano. I imagine Botelho might have had conflicting emotions painting this picture: wanting to capture his father’s essence while grappling with the difficulty of truly knowing another person, even a parent. You can see each brushstroke, like a kind of code for seeing, almost a nervous energy. The paint is applied in such a way that the surface has all this texture. That line that traces his father’s face—the color is so present. It's about how we recognize each other, how a painting captures a likeness, but can also distort and abstract it. Like Francis Bacon, he's interested in pushing the boundaries of representation and figuration. Painters are in an ongoing dialogue across generations, each building on the other’s work, like passing a baton in a relay race. Painting is all about ambiguity, about not knowing for sure and embracing that uncertainty.