Untitled

PALIMPSEST
António Sena’s painting is erudite because it uses cryptic signs, marks of his macerated calligraphy, erased and hidden texts that turn each work into a palimpsest that draws one into interpretation.
Starting with his earliest drawings back in the sixties, when he went to London, his work has focussed on calligraphy and inscription in order to produce beautiful weavings in which drawing, the stain from painting and the mark of writing come together in an indiscernible manner, violating the codes of these disciplines.
Calligraphy and erasing have occupied his space throughout his career, as if his works belonged to the family of classroom blackboards accumulating notes on partially erased marks of previous writing.
Sometimes, particularly in the eighties, the lines became organized almost into constructions, creating meshes that seemed to come from the overlaying of structures, as when one overlays acetates that produce transparencies which at the same time hide things. It is a course of progressive obnubilation, of a saturation of erasing. In these latter works, which include this one here, the painting is complex and contradictory, because the process of its construction is turned into its stigma, as the drawing stands out over any defining of the pictorial field, and the gesture is just a tool for erasing.

Delfim Sardo