First Person | Artist by self

First Act

“Wherever you go, go whole,
Take your heart with you.”
Confucius

I have long been drawing cities that are under construction, imaginary cities without time of their own, since all the times coexist in the same space of those cities. It is my Macao and so many Macaos, simultaneously, living together with memories of fragments of other cities or places, in equal terms, atemporal. These are places that are always in formation and therefore unfinished. And they tell stories that happened and others that I’ve invented. Macau is the pretext, and it has the same meaning that Gabriel García Márques gave to his imaginary village called Macondo.
These drawings are very detailed and large scale. I make them with nozzles of between 0.15 and 0.5, with China ink, on fine-grained, heavy weight watercolor paper, and usually on A3 size sheets. The final design is a patchwork, resulting from the joining of all these sheets.
“Red December” is a boat that is a small town, and sails looking for its own time. I started building it in the Lunar Year of the Dog, on the Long Ngán Vun shipyards of my drawing board, and I am going to finish it in time for the exhibition of the same name.
The “Red December” overflows with stories, aims to bring joy and good mood. It is inhabited by very different people, in time, in space and in their own accomplishments.
Most of them dream. And they have a big heart. Fernando Pessoa bears witness: “I bring inside my heart, / Like in a safe so full that it can’t be completely closed, / Every place I’ve been, / All the ports I’ve come to, / All the landscapes I’ve seen through windows or portholes / Or from decks while dreaming, / And all that, which is so much, is a bit of what I want.”

Second Act
My concept of a library is close to that of Jorge Luis Borges. Of Paradise, even, perhaps: “Paradise would be a kind of library.”
The point is that “my books” have not only letters but images as well, which may or may not be “sources of witchcraft”. Continuing to quote the same Argentine poet, the “book is a physical object in a world of physical objects. It’s a set of dead symbols. And then the right reader arrives, and the words — or rather the poetry hidden in the words, for the words themselves are mere symbols — come alive, and we have a resurrection of the word.”
Like the brush, imitating blood served in ginger, which, by quick-painting the eyes and other parts of the lion in South China, makes it alive. Just now, it was only a lion of paper, cardboard, bamboo, and rags, so beautiful and colorful, but helpless. But it already moves, and flaps its ears. Grows up, stares at us. Already dances! It is both graceful and fierce, brutal and complacent, domineering and docile.
“My library” consists of many books, large and small, full of images and a few words. Perhaps, as Fernando Pessoa wrote: “… books are papers painted with ink.”
Books with daily records of things I like and want to do, or simply because I have to do them. There are many drawings, from a small graphic blur to an inconsequential automated register; a sketch, a study, or a very elaborate and huge drawing. Or supermarket labels or sugar sachets glued on pages as if the most important things in life. How can a little silvery paper wrapping a chocolate be important in our lives? Will the colorful lion already alive bring the right reader?

Editor’s note: This text written by architect and artist Carlos Marreiros is the author’s own description (“Memória Descritiva”) of his “Red December” exhibition organized by the Cultural Affairs Bureau, which opens to the public on Friday, at the Tap Seac Gallery. Carlos Marreiros