Tom and Godiva: Gabriel Abrantes

It was a long day of installation, spent trying every possible arrangement until we landed on a rhythm that displays the works gracefully. I still have to pick up the pace and put down something worthy of the lovely couple, Tom and Godiva, the stars of the exhibition. Perhaps a sleep-deprived feeling is exactly what Gabriel Abrantes expected from me when he texted: "Write with your eyes closed." So, in the Uber ride home, I furiously typed on my phone the very text you are reading now.

This was indeed a cheeky way of passing the torch to me, handing over the same experimental exercise that led him to the primordial forms of the show's protagonists. Rooted in reaching stream-of-consciousness, the method is meant to induce an altered state in which the hand works on its own before the mind can second-guess any logic of composition. He has kept up the practice since a family trip to Iceland, where he left his phone behind and spent those days reconnecting with his inner self. As I promised him in my reply, I will follow the request and trust the process.

Earlier today I shared an initial draft of the press release with the artist for comments, as I usually do. I saw the panic in his face. Staring back at him from my Google Doc he found exactly what he had been trying to escape: a nightmare of polished, satirical curatorial commentary on the legend of Tom and Godiva (who then became peeping Tom), its origins, and a farfetched connection to the Abstract Expressionism movement, when all he wanted was to share his newly rediscovered joy in painting. Simple as that! But an even bigger task for me...

To give you some context, this series began as blind sketches, childish, candid blobs in a notebook that grew increasingly gruesome through the addition of absurd amounts of blood and other digital effects of expansion and stretching of these human-like bodies. With the intuitive emergence of Tom and Godiva, Abrantes saw a chance to rethink painting as an escape, a way of freeing himself from within his practice. He admits that his wish to work comes out of pure love for the medium, its traditions and history, and above all as a homage to the twelve-year-old aspiring painter he once was, who wanted nothing more than to portray his friends and family in the style of Paula Rego.

This ecstatic joy seems almost incompatible with the mutilated naked exploded subjects of the paintings. How can this sense of liberation translate into so much violence? The artist has a great point on this, and it is the result of long reflections on the sustainability of art making in today's day and age: what separates us from artificial intelligence is the surprise factor of human idiosyncrasy, something no language system can predict. He views spontaneity as our secret weapon against digital entities.

Through humour and provocation, this obvious contrast expresses profound admiration for the practice of painting while at the same time pushing it to its limits as an act of activism in opposition to the scroll slop. Returning to a more instinctive, almost virgin way of making means working towards refusing self-censorship and rejecting the discourse of social media.

For the same reason, I want to respect the fact that he doesn't want to impose any explanation on the series and would rather let it speak for itself. Still, that is a lot of responsibility for the work to carry, the possible readings of Tom and Godiva are an open twenty volume art history book. However, Gabriel Abrantes created these paintings without thinking twice and you are welcome to look at them the same way.