BIOGRAPHY
Carlos Estrela was born in Terceira Island, in the Azores, but early left for Canada, where he spent his childhood. He was attracted by drawing and painting, as soon as his hands touched a box of crayons. Back in the Azores at the age of 9, he grew up next to the sea and the seismic earth that stubbornly shakes. Throughout his life, and as far back as he can remember, he has always been fascinated by color and trying to represent the world in an abstract and timeless way, alienated and aware at the same time. The interest in painting was cultivated during adolescence and deepened later while taking a degree in Information Technologies where he came into contact with museums and contemporary art exhibitions as a student. The love for the raw textures of nature and architecture reflected in the landscape catapults to the canvases in experiences that are confusing and ethereal, in an almost poetic narrative that claims the origins of the islands, in a collaboration between the artist and the land (the “cerrados” of the Azores). He believes he will always be ART for those who admire him as he sees ART in everything and everyone he admires.
CV
CERRADOS – Latest exhibition in Centro Cultural e de Congressos de Angra do Heroísmo (December 2021).
Inspired by the fields (called cerrados) of the Azores, he imagined a set of individual paintings of different sizes and thicknesses, using mixed media to invoke textures such as stone, lime, earth, the furrows of the plows and other elements present in Azorean urbanism and landscaping. Each painting takes the form of a “cerrado”, minimalist from an individual point of view, but together and in space results in an abstract, graphic and even architectural reinterpretation of the landscape. The individual “cerrados” come together in 9 compositions, each with a base color that represents an island and its known color. The 10th composition is the Archipelago.
CONTINUUM II – Art folded as continuum lines of color evoking landscapes and spaces between reality and abstract reality (August 2011)
CONTINUUM – A retrospective of his works (September 2005)
STATEMENT
I will never be an artist if in your eyes I cannot move you or convey what I feel. I will be an artist when I feel you arrive unannounced and through the stormy wind you touch my hand, the hand that peacefully brushes the canvas to catch the light.
