By Leto William
The arts and humanities are essential—not because they are exclusive to humanity, but because they remind us of something greater: creativity is not a human privilege but a force that moves through everything—plants, animals, minerals, the invisible. The universe itself is expression, and art is a way of attuning to this ongoing flow. Creation is not just invention but perception—a heightened awareness of what already pulses around us. In my work, I seek this rhythm: repetition as heartbeat, matter as a trace of time. Burned wood, fragmented sound, the minimal variation of a line—these are not just formal elements but ways of capturing this force in motion. If we truly wish to celebrate the arts, perhaps we should widen our perspective beyond the human—considering art as part of a larger process where matter and gesture, time and rhythm, creation and dissolution intertwine. More than an object or a finished work, art is an opening to what emerges in the act of making—to the forces that move through us and beyond us.
My work moves between literature, philosophy, and Brazilian modernism, always in an autographic way—writing my practice as much as I practice it. In visual arts, I navigate between two-dimensional, three-dimensional, and sound-based forms, treating materiality as a kind of spatial writing. In parallel, I explore poetic writing, investigating the sonic frictions between Portuguese and French, searching for rhythms embedded in language itself. In recent paintings, the repetition of a single motif is not about variation but insistence: a pulse, a breath that structures space. The surface is not merely a support but a trace of the encounter between material and gesture—burned wood, scraped paint, rhythm established through repetition. My works do not illustrate concepts nor respond to external demands. They are the result of a state of presence, a continuous exercise in losing oneself—abandoning categories, allowing matter to speak. What emerges from this displacement is not a predefined project, but an openness to what imposes itself in the act of making,
