The Sensory Vacuum

— or why I paint what I cannot say

The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein once wrote one of the most piercing remarks in modern thought:

“The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.”

It sounds like a sentence. A cage. As if, without words to name an experience, it would remain invisible — swallowed by silence.

But what happens when life throws you right into the middle of the map — into the tangle of languages that intersect, collide, and so often fail to translate what you carry?

I grew up in the in-between. Portuguese with the warmth of affection. Arabic with the weight of ancestry. French with a different cadence, a different breath. And still, there are moments when the sum of all the dictionaries in the world leaves a deficit of silence.

A void.

I chose to call this space the sensory vacuum.

It is not absence. It is excess. It is the dense baggage of longing, resilience, farewells, and new beginnings that simply doesn’t fit into the square structure of a grammatically correct sentence. Trying to explain with ordinary words what it means to plant roots in lands that constantly rebuild themselves — it’s like trying to hold the sea between your fingers.

Logical language hits the wall. And crumbles.

I remember an afternoon when I tried to describe my grandmother to someone.

Not her appearance — but the little pats on my back when she hugged me, the smell of the futon washed with care, the way she pronounced my name as if it were a prayer.

I tried. I used every word I had. And I left the conversation feeling like I had told everything but said nothing.

That’s when I understood: some things are not meant to be said.

They are meant to be shown.

It is at this edge — where words fail — that art demands entry.

For me, painting is not illustrating. It is translating the invisible. My art is born and breathes within this sensory vacuum. Where the mouth falls silent and the mind fails to label, raw matter takes control.

The birds and the Godivas give me the voice of silence.

When language reaches its limit, I do not accept being muted. I change the game.

What cannot be said in verbs gains wings. Gains colors that exist in no dictionary. Gains the essential nudity of those figures that inhabit my canvases — with contours that never close, because the soul accepts no frames, and identity is always in motion.

I look at a canvas and see an inner landscape that no words could ever encompass. I see my grandmother’s little pats on my back. I smell the futon washed with care. I hear the sound of the sea in another language. I see what was left out of every conversation I ever had.

If the limits of my language are the limits of my world, art is the instrument that pushes those borders toward the infinite.

It does not come to fill the vacuum with noise or explanations. It comes to give body to the unspeakable. To make you, looking at a canvas, finally hear what no name in the world has ever been able to explain.

Because there are silences that scream. There are silences that comfort. There are silences that heal.

And there are things that logic will never decipher — but that sensitivity will always be able to embrace.

And you? Have you ever felt this vacuum? What do you do when words fail?