On Success, Visibility and the Fear of Being Forgotten

Recently I shared the video of the portrait I painted of Manuel Luís Goucha.

The presenter, who has more than one million followers, accepted to share the publication together with me. It was a small emotional video showing the delivery of the painting, his first reaction to seeing it and also moments from the process of painting itself. I have written before about how sharing art often feels like the final stage of painting. Sometimes I even question if a painting truly exists today if it is never shared. As if the act of painting alone is somehow incomplete without communication afterwards. For years I tried to convince myself that the result of sharing online should not define success. That likes, reach and views should not matter. But the truth is more complicated than that. There is something deeply human in wanting to be seen. And after spending days, weeks or months creating something, it becomes difficult not to feel discouraged when that work disappears almost invisibly into the digital world. Deep down, I know that numbers are not directly connected to the quality of art. But I would also be lying if I denied the dopamine that comes from seeing notifications appear on the screen. At this point I have more than one thousand publications on my art Instagram page. In more than ten years of posting consistently, it has been rare for my work to reach more than a few thousand people. I can count on one hand the number of times my paintings reached ten thousand views. Most of the time, the results feel more discouraging than motivating.

And perhaps that is why what happened on May 29 felt so overwhelming.

The moment I learned that Manuel Luís Goucha would share the video with me, I immediately felt excited. Not only because of the visibility, but because I knew that his participation somehow validated the painting publicly. It was no longer just my own belief in the work. The portrait had been accepted and embraced by the person it represented. Hours after the publication, the video had already surpassed every expectation I had. Fifty thousand views quickly became hundreds of thousands. The comments multiplied. People started sharing the work. Public figures I admire personally began reaching out saying they wanted paintings too.

Then a second video was shared and the numbers grew even further. In only a few days, my page reached almost three million impressions. I could feel the dopamine growing every time I opened the application. Every new notification, every new follower, every comment created a small moment of stimulation. I checked Instagram in the morning before getting out of bed and again before sleeping.

Not because I was happier. But because I was stimulated. Perhaps even addicted, temporarily, to the feeling of momentum. And what frightened me slightly was realizing how quickly the mind adapts to growth. What initially felt impossible suddenly starts feeling normal, and then comes the pressure to maintain it.

To repeat it.

To surpass it.

That is the dangerous part. Because if success becomes attached only to visibility, then silence immediately begins to feel like failure. The strange thing is that I secretly believed for years that my paintings deserved to reach more people. After more than a decade of consistently posting and improving my work, it is difficult not to feel invisible sometimes. When a painting reaches nobody, the feeling is not only frustration. It is irrelevance As if the work disappeared too quickly.But at the same time, I know visibility and meaning are not necessarily the same thing.

The digital world rewards speed, novelty and immediate reaction. Art rarely works that way. A painting can take months to create and only seconds to scroll past.

And still, paintings somehow survive time differently from digital moments. Even though paintings themselves are objects, the act of creating them is also ephemeral. The feeling while painting exists only in that exact moment and never fully returns again. Maybe that is why I have always found beauty in ephemeral things.

Life itself is temporary.

Perhaps paintings are simply attempts to hold certain moments still a little longer. I have already admitted to myself that in the past I created paintings searching for visibility, followers and approval. It is easy to fall into that trap because social media transforms art into constant comparison and constant reward systems. And slowly, without realizing it, I started painting people I did not feel connected to. Images that perhaps worked better online but did not help me grow as a painter. I only understood that after stepping away for a while and rediscovering what truly inspired me again. Curiously, it happened around the same period where my connection with Japan became stronger. Somewhere between silence, travel and slowing down, I remembered why I wanted to paint in the first place. Not to create something viral. But to capture something honestly. A feeling. A presence. A moment that deserves to remain. That is why this recent visibility feels both exciting and dangerous. I am grateful for it. Truly. To suddenly have millions of people seeing something I created with my own hands is overwhelming in the best possible way. It motivates me. It creates momentum. It opens doors. But at the same time, I know I cannot allow these numbers to define the value of what I paint next. Because if I start chasing only what performs well, I risk losing the reason I paint at all. And perhaps that is the contradiction of modern artistic life. We want our work to be seen.
But we must be careful not to become servants of visibility itself. Perhaps visibility and meaning are not the same thing.