Tiago Beltrao

Born of an artistically directionless mindset, my series ‘Writings on my wall’ has been a reflective journal on the domestic Artist experience since the beginning of the UK’s third lockdown. 

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My coded paintings, devised of a glyph like alphabet, document the thoughts, activities’ and conversations that come from living, working and sleeping in the same four walls for a year. While initially beginning the project as intuitive abstract experiments born of a similar aimless mind-set in lockdown, my fascination with the symbol like patterns evolved into my own language that provided an outlet for day to day thoughts. The series’ writings and visual stimuli can be as intricate as rants on the restrictions of working in quarantine, short as phrases uttered during the day and random as reviews of films, music and entertainment more hungrily consumed while stuck within my room. My intuitive, undetermined process that has gone into each painting mirrors my own search for motivation during my first year and so choices of complimentary colours, shapes and patterns all work in tandem to create a visually balanced painting as an act of simple self-motivation. Studio canvas gives way to found materials like pallets, offcuts of wood and tiles - detritus to construct these modern day artefacts out of. Caligrafitti artists like Retna and Niels Meulman who similarly play with language and blend Ancient calligraphy with urban colours were influential in creating works 'out of time’. Despite numerous experiments into the 3D space such as casting, light and the use of layered materials, I constantly found myself drawn back to the core concept of paint and language. 

The cypher seeks to create recordings unique to the present pandemic; indecipherable when viewed outside the current moment.

These works are a time capsule of the nuances that generations outside of the pandemic won't understand.

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