Alex D. da Silva

My work has always circled around our relationship to the land, the spaces we inhabit, and the ways they are reshaped, whether by human hands or by nature itself. It is an inquiry into memory, a testing of the stories we tell ourselves.

History is inescapable, even when so often ignored. If we refuse to look back, we risk repeating the same mistakes. Painting is my way of engaging with that history, and of grounding myself in the only home any of us will ever have.

The paintings I make are crowded with symbols, shaped by an anxious imagination. I build them gradually, layering textures and mediums, adding and subtracting elements, weaving a visual story I keep telling myself. To me, they exist beyond the moment, and I live inside each one completely. At the beginning of a new work, I return to that place—not out of nostalgia or conscious design, but because it is where the connections live, and where I still find my way into painting.