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Antonia Figueiredo

@af.illustrations

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🇧🇷Creative
📍TALLINN 🇪🇪
Represented by: @totogroup.io
@notantonia3.0

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Where do you run to when you sleep?

A bedroom seems like the perfect place for this piece. So happy it’s found it’s forever home in Vienna!!

Go see more of my work at @maite.reformation in Vienna if you are around ;) taken in Vienna, Austria by @af.illustrations

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13 hours ago

I know what to say. That’s the first thing. I always know what to say.
Not because I’ve rehearsed, or more like, not only because I’ve rehearsed, but because somewhere along the way the language became available to me in a way it isn’t for other people. I can feel the shape of a goodbye before it arrives. The slight change in atmospheric pressure, the conversation that starts to curve toward its own ending. I move toward it rather than away. I find the words that are honest without being cruel, warm without being false, that close something without slamming it. People have thanked me, afterward. Have said: that was kind, the way you did that. And I genuinely believe they meant it as a compliment.
I receive it as a compliment. Mostly.
There is a kind of grace to a well-executed goodbye, and I think it’s true, I also think it’s worth examining what it means that I’ve had enough practice to develop one. Grace usually comes from repetition. Repetition implies frequency. Frequency, in this case, implies something about how I move through the world and what I keep doing in it.
I am very good at goodbyes. I have said this to people as though it were a simple fact about myself, like being good at parallel parking or knowing how to cook. A skill. Neutral. Something you either have or you don’t.
I’m less sure, lately, that it’s neutral.
You don’t arrive at this kind of fluency without an education. by @af.illustrations

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a day ago

There is an imbalance in asking someone to call you, though it took me time to recognize it. The request always appears simple, almost neutral. But the action it proposes belongs completely to the other person, while the exposure settles quietly on the one who asks. I noticed this only after I had already written the words, when it was too late to pretend they were just ornamental.

Nothing in the request promises reciprocity. It does not even promise a response. It merely announces availability. To ask is to accept that the next movement is no longer yours, and to still, somehow remain present anyway. I am not especially practiced in this posture. I am more accustomed to closing distance myself, to mistaking initiative for safety. Waiting, I have learned, is a different discipline altogether, it asks for stillness, to listen rather than advance.
The phrase written in the painting reads simply: call me. I did not soften it. I resisted the metaphor. The directness felt faintly embarrassing, which is how I knew it was necessary. A call is an interruption. It collapses distance abruptly. To invite one is to acknowledge that silence has already begun to contour the body, that attention has already oriented itself toward an absence.

This painting is included in my limited time studio sale! Don’t miss your chance to get an original painting for your home by @af.illustrations

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3 days ago

Back in the studio for the first time since July!!!!
Bringing back the studio days and I couldn’t be happier! by @af.illustrations

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4 days ago

The first ordinary day after something good has a particular texture, and I’ve been trying to describe it to myself recently without much success. Nothing is missing, exactly. The coffee is the same coffee, the dog needs walking as it always does, the light comes into the kitchen at the angle it has every day, and none of it is worse than it was before. It’s only that I now know where the level was a few days ago, and the knowing has changed how the room sits around me. I’m not sad. A little, maybe.

Tallinn is a port town, and in the harbour the walls keep a record of this kind of thing. The Baltic hardly has a tide, not like where I come from, but it has storms, and on the stone there’s a dark band where the sea reached at its highest and then stopped. What I’ve always liked about it is that it doesn’t record the water at all, only the point the water got to. You can’t see it while the water is up. You can only read it afterwards, standing on dry stone, looking up at a line that tells you how far under you would have been. Nobody looks at a calm sea and calls it emptiness. They call it the sea. And yet I’ve been spending a reasonable amount of time walking around my own life looking at the line.

This painting reminds me of Tallinn, and it’s currently available in my studio sale!! Only until November 5th by @af.illustrations

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5 days ago

There are canvases in my studio that have been leaning face-in against the wall for so long that I’ve stopped thinking of them as paintings at all. I think of them the way you think of a radiator or a doorframe, as something the room was built around rather than something that was put there, something you’d only notice if one morning it was gone. I walk past them every day. I don’t turn them around.

I used to think this was a kind of care. I was keeping them close, keeping them safe, keeping them mine, though I wouldn’t have said that last part out loud. A painting that hasn’t left the studio is still in conversation with me. It’s still technically unfinished, still able to be touched up or painted over or argued with at two in the morning, when I’m briefly certain I know how to fix it. That’s the appeal. Nothing that stays is ever quite done.

But I’ve started to suspect that’s also the problem.

A painting on a wall in someone else’s home is a different object from the one I made. It gets looked at while someone waits for the kettle. Or it isn’t looked at for months, and then it’s suddenly seen again on a bad day, and whatever it means there, it means without me. I don’t get to explain it. I don’t get to stand beside it and qualify. I think that’s what finishing actually is. It isn’t the last brushstroke. It’s the moment the work stops needing me to hold it up.

A room full of your own past attempts has a particular weight. Every canvas is a version of me that was sure about something, a colour or a year or a person. I keep all of them in one room and then wonder why the room feels crowded, why it’s hard to start anything in there, why the blank canvas I bought in spring is still wrapped in plastic by the door. It isn’t that there’s no space. There’s just no room, which is different.

The studio sale opens tonight. For a whole month I’ll be saying goodbye.
Everything that’s been facing the wall is now facing out. by @af.illustrations

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5 days ago

Keep an eye out on Monday for a big painting studio clean out!! Everything’s gotta go bye bye

There are canvases in my studio that have been leaning face-in against the wall for so long that I’ve stopped thinking of them as paintings at all. I think of them the way you think of a radiator or a doorframe, as something the room was built around rather than something that was put there, something you’d only notice if one morning it was gone. I walk past them every day. I don’t turn them around.

I used to think this was a kind of care. I was keeping them close, keeping them safe, keeping them mine, though I wouldn’t have said that last part out loud. A painting that hasn’t left the studio is still in conversation with me. It’s still technically unfinished, still able to be touched up or painted over or argued with at two in the morning, when I’m briefly certain I know how to fix it. That’s the appeal. Nothing that stays is ever quite done.

But I’ve started to suspect that’s also the problem.

A painting on a wall in someone else’s home is a different object from the one I made. It gets looked at while someone waits for the kettle. Or it isn’t looked at for months, and then it’s suddenly seen again on a bad day, and whatever it means there, it means without me. I don’t get to explain it. I don’t get to stand beside it and qualify. I think that’s what finishing actually is. It isn’t the last brushstroke. It’s the moment the work stops needing me to hold it up.

There’s a more honest version of this essay. It’s shorter, and it mostly involves the word rent. That’s true too, is all. by @af.illustrations

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9 days ago

Whirlwind September !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! by @af.illustrations

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9 days ago

Last day for archival prints!!! On the website now under back from the dead !!!!! Get them before they are gone tomorrow!!! by @af.illustrations

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10 days ago

You know it’s serious when the uniform comes on!!!
Shoutout to my main squeeze, top number 1 studio roomate @lucyxlone @folkloregoods.co !!!! by @af.illustrations

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15 days ago

There are moments when I feel myself moving before I understand why. Not decisively, not with confidence… More like the way the body shifts in sleep, responding to a need it hasn’t yet named. Thought, consciousness, arrives later, often late, trying to assemble a narrative around something that has already happened. I recognize these moments only in retrospect, when I realize I’ve been carried somewhere before I agreed to go.

The Great Companion was made inside one of those movements. I wasn’t trying to illustrate surrender, or faith, or even motion as an idea. I was responding to a sensation, a pull, that felt older than intention. Me leva, the painting seemed to say. Carry me, I heard myself say to the painting. At the time, I couldn’t tell whether this was a request or a relinquishing. I only knew that resisting it felt impossible.

See more behind my inspiration behind this painting on the website.

Come see this painting at Aethos Lisbon! Less than one week to purchase this print and more! Limited time only until October 1st, don’t miss your chance! by @af.illustrations

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16 days ago

The game is simple. One child stands at a distance, asking permission to move forward. The other grants or denies it, sometimes allowing large steps, sometimes insisting on small ones, sometimes sending the player back entirely. Progress is never self-determined. It must be requested, then approved. As children, we treat this as play. We do not recognize it as rehearsal.
I learned early that movement could be negotiated. That desire alone was insufficient. One had to ask, to wait, to listen for the terms under which advancement would be permitted. I learned this so thoroughly that I stopped noticing I had learned it. It became the water. It became the only way motion made sense.

Mother, may I?

It is a strange sentence. Both an assertion and a submission. It announces intention while simultaneously relinquishing authority over it. The desire is voiced, but ownership of its fulfillment is transferred elsewhere. I did not understand, for a long time, what that transfer was really doing for me. I thought it was about fear of refusal. I thought the question was a hedge against disappointment, a way of softening the blow if the answer was no. by @af.illustrations

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16 days ago