What Does It Mean to Paint? Painting as Ritual, Listening, and Transformation

What really happens before a painting is born?
We often imagine painting as a mix of inspiration, technique, and talent. Of course, within an artwork there are the hand, study, mistakes, matter, and time. But for me, there is something deeper that guides every brushstroke.

For me, every artwork is a ritual.

I don’t mean a ritual in a solemn or mysterious sense. I’m referring to that exact moment when I enter into a relationship with something that lives within me: an image, a wound, a memory, or a question that does not yet have a name. When I paint, I am not just “making a picture.” I am searching for a truth.

Painting as Listening: Giving Shape to the Invisible

My works rarely begin from a preconceived idea; they almost always emerge from listening. I listen to what moves within me and to what, in the world, wounds or questions me. Painting thus becomes the place where silence takes shape.

Sometimes the starting point is deeply personal: identity, the need to be recognized, memory. At other times, the urgency is collective:

• The fight against gender-based violence.
• The wounded breath of the Amazon.
• The stories of invisible people who are forgotten too quickly.

Ultimately, the movement is always the same: to feel, to pass through, to transform. Painting forces me to slow down, compels me to stay, and above all, asks for honesty.

Why Painting Is a Rite of Passage

I say that painting is a ritual because each work marks a boundary between a before and an after. Before, there is something pulsing and asking for space; after, there is an image that, even if it does not resolve everything, makes visible what was submerged.

In this sense, the painterly gesture does not serve to decorate the surface of things, but to transform the way we look at them. To paint means to cross a threshold:

• Between what I know and what I am still trying to understand.
• Between pain and form.
• Between the chaos of the world and presence on the canvas.

Have you ever felt something so intensely that you couldn’t put it into words? For me, the creative process begins exactly at that point of suspension.

Art and Responsibility: Between Ethical Urgency and Beauty

For a long time, I believed that my art always had to be “useful.” I felt the weight of having to justify every mark with a statement, a social theme, or an ethical urgency. Telling the dignity and resilience of peoples, or the fragility of territories, is part of who I am—but I have come to understand that if I ask art to be only useful, I risk suffocating it.

Painting also needs light, breath, and freedom. I have rediscovered the value of beauty—not as escapism, but as nourishment. That gratuitous gesture that does not flee from reality, but allows us to inhabit it without breaking.

This balance, too, is part of the ritual: knowing how to hold together the cry of protest and the peace of a color laid down simply for the joy of it.