Common Denominator

With the following artist:
Max Freund and Sara Gonçalves.

text by Márcia R. Teixeira,

We distance ourselves from our lives by looking at the lives of others. The other often presents itself as a dream, an idealization, a hidden desire filled with frustration. Is common to think that everything would be better if we were someone else, or if we were the other. I'm not talking about recurring thoughts, but the kind of thoughts that seizes us when routine shifts from mundane to burdensome, from commonplace to complicated. Unconsciously, this is a shared feeling because the other, in reality, feels the same way.

The routine that often imprisons us, saturates us, makes us question whether it would be better to be someone else, is also the routine that safeguards us, holds us, and gives us control over our own fate. We act in our individuality with the certainty that, as much as it may seem, we are not alone. We all share something with each other. And the routine that is not ours is also routine.

Day-to-day life is composed by trivialities, objects, thoughts, gestures, and people that repeat themselves. They repeat day after day, and due to repetition, we stop looking with curiosity.

Focusing mainly on the process, Max Freund collects materials and objects from daily life to give them a second life. His work starts from a careful observation of the objects, textures, and materials that surround him, thus reassessing their potential and redefining their meaning. Between the abstract and the figurative, he creates an imagined space where he redefines languages, creating his own, which unfolds in multiple interpretations for the viewer. The other presents itself to Max not as an opposite pole but as a vehicle for new creations.

Sara Gonçalves looks tenderly at the life around her, the objects that surround her, the people she shares with, and the essence of small things. She finds in the mundane all the capacities that the mundane has to offer us. In this new creative process where she explores portraiture, she starts by painting people who inspire her to quickly move on to painting people she doesn't know or doesn't remember having seen. Exploring the idea of the other, Sara finds herself in all these portraits because ultimately, we are all the other, and the other is us.

In those where the taste for looking at the mundane still resides, there is hope for continuity, the perseverance of a certain fascination that has been gradually lost. And it is in the observation of the languages of everyday life that we find the common denominator between these two artists.