A set of cross-references brings me a coexistence of concepts (perhaps) inseparable from the work of João Dias (b.1983): boldness, intimacy, expansion, and excavation. I recall John Berger (1926-2017) and the “Ways of Seeing”1 revolution of 1972: a set of seven theoretical essays, echoed in a series of the same name on the BBC that proved a phenomenon of popularity with the public for the way it democratised the possibilities of apprehending the artwork.2 Berger believed that the gaze is not only physiological but rather cultural. Images are built to be looked at and this way of looking determines our way of understanding. In other words, according to the English art critic, how we perceive and react to images vary according to our experiences and our context. The same image can thus provide different perspectives and different meanings. There is no single, frontal gaze, but a multiple, syncopated gaze. Berger induces stories about the artistic objects, contextualizes them and, at the beginning of the 1970s, what he proposes is aligned with the urgency of literacy that is being discussed and with the emancipatory practices, in the relationship between the artwork and the viewer, that are being designed. References to João Dias, an artist with a degree in Fine Arts – Painting from the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Lisbon (2006), had come to me through the back door when I was preparing an exploratory visit to Viseu, the aim of which was to make contact with his creative class. And, that day, the discovery of his studio was reserved as twilight time. It has been a while, a long time, since my eyes landed on a body of work and a processual space so intimate and, at the same time, so organically close to the industrial processes that make my preferences so much in the framework of the artistic production of the 21st century. I had no doubt, and verbalised with witnesses, that I was in the presence of one of the most original artists of his generation. The record player started chanting inside my head and, from “Sunday Morning” to “European Son”, the 11 tracks ran non-stop as I activated my way of seeing and asked questions.

The Velvet Underground & Nico from 1967, with a cover by Andy Warhol (1928-1987), is one of those epiphanies that sum up a generation. The 1960s and 1970s are a special time for artistic practices in which the limits of art are questioned in a confluence of trends, movements, authors and even geographies. Warhol and other names of pop art, besides the critical praise to the consumer society and the idolatry to a set of personalities of mass culture, introduce the silk screen processes and the reproduction of the image of the artworks in the system, managing also to create a new possibility of palette that causes a straight cut with the mimetic colour. Colour, from the time of pop art, entered the realm of the imagination and became the symbol of a counterculture based on a kind of revolution for love and freedom. Arthur Danto (1924-2013) was perhaps the first philosopher and thinker on the art of our time who made me awaken to the magic of pop art. After reading him, I remembered an exhibition I had seen in 2010 at The Albertina Museum, in Vienna, Austria – “Cars by Andy Warhol” – which recovered a series for Mercedes Benz, the automobile brand symbol of a generation and which Janis Joplin (1943-1970) eternalised in a simple and ironic song: “Oh Lord, won’t you buy me a Mercedes Benz?”. From the Vienna exhibition, I remember that it corresponded to a reopening of the museum and that, for the first time, I fell in love with the so-called “exposed concrete” and the relationship it established with the pictorial vibrancy of Warhol’s works. The car and cement as symbols in our industrialised era, as reflections of the cosmopolitan city, painted by the colour of our culture made of crossbreeding and dreams. Convening sculpture, or in a wider field of the so-called expanded painting, what I discovered of the recent production of João Dias combines influences in the Anglo-Saxon neo-conceptual, of minimalism, with the colour of pop, in the forms that provoke this dialogue with the sense of the Polis where the landscape has gendered ramblings.

At the moment that his expression, industrial in nature, but archaeological at the same time (in the sense that it hides, through the semiotics of colour and, sometimes, of light, a secret, a catharsis, and an emotional trampling), expands to the landscape, interferes with the buildings and the architectures, João Dias questions the public, far beyond the contemplative dimension of painting that made him believe that he was for Art halfway to the Olympus that belongs to him. In one of the projects he has in development, and which he had the courtesy to share with me, he approaches his role as mediator and dialogues with the History of Art, introducing elements of the multiple digital possibilities that are also of his time. I would call it boldness because, as a rule, we know more examples of artists who retreat from the third plane of creation to the second, for the commercial comfort that painting has. João Dias does the inverse path, he expands, never losing the intimate place of the blank sheet on which he draws in order to find himself. Why Viseu? Why swap Lisbon for Viseu after Berlin? For love. Boldness, I would reinforce. Roland Barthes (1915-1980) wrote: