Day trips to the coast meant, winding roads through the "Serra", until suddenly, the ocean appeared. A warm white light seemed to color everything. At my father’s friends’ homes, the air was heavy with turpentine, brushes and canvases stacked everywhere, books spilling from shelves, images upon images. Once, soldiers in green helmets and olive uniforms circled our green Volkswagen Beetle. That one was frightening, though the adults barely spoke of it. São Paulo, Brazil, in the early 1970s.

My father was already an older man when I was born, he was a well-known painter and a respected art critic. My mother was a generation younger, from a different world. She was strikingly beautiful, with a grounded strength. When I was seven, my father suffered a stroke that left him partially disabled, and life shifted suddenly. My mother, always strong, became even more so, taking on a kind of superhero presence. We traveled often, visiting his many friends. Sometimes he painted. Sometimes, I painted alongside him. That brief apprenticeship opened the door into his world, and surprisingly, I still remember nearly every lesson he taught me.

The paintings I attempted as a child were dense with symbolism, shaped by my anxious imagination. They never survived beyond those moments, but I inhabited each of them fully. Even now, whenever I begin a new work, I find myself returning to that place—not from nostalgia or intellectual intent, but because it’s where the connections live, where they find their way into paint.

My work has always circled around how we occupy the land—the spaces we live in—and how they transform, by human hands or by nature itself. It is about questioning memories, testing the stories we tell ourselves.

For me, history is inescapable, even if so often ignored. Without looking back, we are destined to repeat the same mistakes. My painting is my way of engaging with that history, and of grounding myself in the only home each of us will ever have. — Alex D. da Silva

Learn more about Alex D. da Silva at his website or Instagram.