I went to see the pictures that the painter Maria Antonia Jardim will exhibit at the Doctor's House in September. The Artist showed and talked and talked and showed, but I did not pay any attention to what she was saying. For lack of education?! Most certainly not! It was just because those who create art are the least suitable to give explanations about what they have created.

But I'll explain myself better, because I think I can, even if I am not an artistic creator, of course.

Eric Kandel, Nobel Prize Laureate in Medicine 2000 thanks to his work on memory, published in 2013 an extraordinary book that is a revolution about the interpretation of the painting.

The title is "The Age of Insight; the quest to understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind, and Brain.

Summarizing the 500 pages of this seductive book, in which permeates the whole Viennese art between the two European wars, is an impossible task. But let here the essential, which is the neurobiological field.

Following close your text will say that, in general, scientists and artists seek to build models of the world; the first using the objective "measurements" and second ones, the artists, creating "impressions" being subjective. Now, construct models of the World are the essential function of perceptual, emotional, and social systems of the human brain, and it is this capacity that enables both the creation by the artist, a work of art, or a re-creation of the one who contemplates it; both of these creations derive the intrinsic creative capacities of the human brain. It is, therefore, clear that both have a sort of surprise - sudden flashes of insight, says Kandel - for which it is known that they use and activate the same brain circuits. The painters then use a type of intelligence to create the framework - as Gardner called spatial intelligence - to "occupy" the space of the screen, and then observe what they did (insight); this observation generates a new creation and so on, until the process terminates occupancy of the space with color and figurations. The table is now ready to be seen; but exists only as a work of art, if it is seen by others that re-create it in themselves. As F. Pessoa has foreseen, “books are papers painted with ink"; there are also frames, not seen, which are painted with paint or equivalent screens. This is the case of frames that the author paints but hides and does not show to anyone; as works of art exist only for the author.

With this new interpretation art entered the field of evolutionary psychology with undeniable neurobiological reasons. The Artist and the Observer bring creativity to the work of art and creativity is unconscious, is not a conscious and rational deliberative process.

This is why the explanations - all rational- that Maria Antonia Jardim, with all her enthusiasm, was giving me of her pictures, did not entice my interest, because what I wanted was to feel, was to live a sudden flash and re-create: me, the work of art as such; I did not care if the picture was painted with oil or acrylic or watercolor or Port wine, for that is the problem of the competent critics. I'm not. I am an average Joe who wants to feel and not judge.

Then, seeing this frames of Maria Antonia Jardim, I realized that for the author - who has extensive and diverse work as a painter - there is a conviction that has dreamlike representations: she has dreamed up realities that have an imperfect relationship with the concrete reality of the outside world. There is, for example, a tower of Clerics embraced which is not what we see when we look at the tower invented by Maria Antonia Jardim. For not being the Tower, the original, I liked to see this other, dreamed up by the painter and involving several dreamlike and ghostly representations that are worth in their symbolic weight.

But it is not for me to anticipate re-creations that will be made by those who have the opportunity to see these pictures (Not to be missed, say it, already.) Each one will make theirs with their brain - a single brain and each one different and therefore with very different creativity than mine.

What I simply have to say is that the contemplation of these paintings is a unique experience because it is an impulsive painting, exquisite, with a powerful force that attacks us and leaves us restless and disturbed - when we dream of risky situations that irresistibly drag us to our inner self.

Maria Antonia Jardim has this power in her painting: she brings us into her dream world and makes us live in it, with restlessness. It is not a painting of peace, is a painting of turbulence, served by a bold technique of space occupation.

I do not like the painters to sign a name in their frames. Words belong to a different kind of semantics that has nothing to do with the semantics of the painting. But, let me make here a final reference: see the "Tree of Life" and "get" the look of the central figure. I should not say anything else, but this was my sudden flash while Maria Antonia Jardim showed and talked and talked and showed...

Text by Daniel Serrão