Alva: Bernardo Liu
Bernardo Liu’s paintings begin with memory, but do not remain within the territory of recollection. Born in Rio de Janeiro into a family of Chinese descent, Liu has developed his practice around images, objects, and forms transmitted across generations: domestic artifacts, elements of Chinese material culture, botanical species associated with tea cultivation, animals, plants, and fragments of everyday life shaped by migration and cultural transmission. These references are not treated as illustrations of a family history, but as a vocabulary through which the artist investigates how experience is remembered, transformed, and continually reimagined.
In this new body of work, memory becomes less a repository of images than a space in which images encounter one another. Liu describes the paintings as fragments of the same day, or of a period that cannot quite be located in chronological time. Some things return to us with extraordinary clarity; others survive only as silhouettes, sensations, colors, or traces.
The paintings translate these different degrees of recollection into their own language: some forms are carefully articulated, while others remain sketched, obscured, partially erased, or absorbed into the layers of the surface. What emerges is not a reconstruction of the past, but an image of the unstable process through which the past continues to take shape.
The notion of condensation is central to this process. Much like in a dream, where different people, places, moments, and experiences can converge within a single image, Liu brings together elements that would not necessarily coexist outside the canvas. A porcelain animal may appear beside a botanical form derived from tea cultivation; a domestic vessel may share the same space as a plant, a bird, or an ambiguous figure. Once displaced from their original contexts, these elements become characters within a shared pictorial world, acquiring their own presence, temperament, and relationships.
This condensation produces a kind of horizontalization: the paintings suspend the hierarchies between animate and inanimate, natural and artificial, lived and inherited, real and imagined. A plant is not necessarily more alive than a porcelain object; an animal does not necessarily occupy a more important position than a vessel or a fragment of decorative imagery. Each can become a living presence within the painting, allowing inherited images to encounter personal memories and familiar things to become strange without losing their familiarity.
The pictorial surface participates directly in this process. Through layering, scraping, covering, blurring, and revealing, Liu allows forms to emerge and recede as though moving between different states of visibility. What is hidden is not necessarily absent; what has been covered may continue to exert a presence beneath the surface. In this sense, the paintings do not simply depict memories—they behave like them. They condense, rearrange, obscure, and revive, allowing different temporalities to coexist without resolving them into a single narrative.
Each painting thus becomes a small ecology of relations: a temporary world in which things that once belonged to different places, times, and meanings can coexist. Within this condensed space, the boundaries between object and character, memory and imagination, past and present begin to loosen. Memory emerges not as a faithful record of what has been, but as an active force capable of giving new forms of life to what has been inherited, forgotten, imagined, or only partially remembered.
Text by Pedro Scudeller
