The Right to Feel

Am I Not Intellectual Enough?

This weekend I went to CAM Gulbenkian, a museum dedicated to modern and contemporary art.

Every time I visit a museum like this, a familiar uncertainty returns. I love museums. I love slowing down in front of paintings. I love the magnitude of the great masters. The detail of Rembrandt. The devotion to craft in a sculpture. The vibrating colour fields of Rothko. The abstraction of Kandinsky that still carries tension and structure.

When I stand in front of those works, I slow down. I feel small. I feel that I am not even close to being a great artist, and that feeling is humbling, not destructive. I feel connected to generations before me. I feel the presence of someone who worked, struggled, insisted. Even if I do not personally like a piece, I can recognise the mastery, the labour, the repetition behind it. I can see effort. I can sense devotion. That moves me.

But when I stand in front of certain conceptual works, something else happens.

It is not anger. It is not rejection. It is nothing.

And then frustration.

I like to understand things. Especially in the field I love. When I feel nothing, I begin to question myself. What is wrong with me? Am I not intellectual enough? Am I too simple? Am I missing a code everyone else understands?

It is not that I believe conceptual art is less art. It is not that I deny its place. But I cannot force myself to feel what I do not feel. And what troubles me is not disliking something. It is the absence of connection.

Sometimes I look at a piece and I struggle because I cannot see craft, repetition, mastery. I know that even Pablo Picasso trained relentlessly before he could “draw like a child”. Effort hides behind simplicity. Discipline precedes freedom. When I do not perceive that labour, I feel disoriented.

Maybe I am wrong. Maybe I am limited. But I cannot pretend.

Today, on a Monday, I accompanied the actor and director Lucas Dutra to Sociedade Civil on RTP2. The topic was the future of cinema. The debate quickly turned into why cinema theatres in Portugal are closing.

On one side, the defence of author cinema and the idea that the public must be educated to appreciate it. On the other, the argument that cinema should also meet audiences where they are. The tension escalated when it was said that great author films do not need immediate success, that recognition can come fifty years later.

I felt conflicted.

What disturbed me was not the defence of authorial work. It was the arrogance in saying the public must be educated, as if taste were a defect to correct. As if popularity implied superficiality. If something moves many people, that must mean something. It does not mean it is shallow. It means it touched.

We no longer live in the same distribution world. Today, people have immediate access to art, and artists have immediate access to audiences. In the past, works could fail simply because distribution failed. Gatekeepers controlled diffusion. Today, audiences have power. They can respond instantly.

Does that mean everything popular is profound? No. But it also does not mean that depth must reject the public.

The myth of the misunderstood genius recognised fifty years later is romantic. It is also convenient. Perhaps some visionaries are ahead of their time. Perhaps new languages take time to be understood. But we cannot ignore that the context has changed. Communication has changed. Access has changed.

This debate took me back to my years at the Faculty of Fine Arts, where I often felt small. Professors defended conceptual art with certainty, and I struggled to defend something simple: that for me, art must have an aesthetic and appreciative factor. Not for everyone. Not universally. But for me.

I am not saying what art must be. I am saying what I need from it.

Beauty. Craft. Emotional impact. Desire.

When someone stands in front of my portraits and says they are too aesthetic, I listen. I know I am not a master. I see many flaws in my work. I am far from where I want to be. But I also know that I create what I love to see. Faces. Imperfections. Presence. I need to make something real. To immortalise a human being in front of me. That need is stronger than theory.

Conceptual art once pushed me away from art entirely. Not because it was wrong. But because I did not feel strong enough to stand in my own position. If I did not understand, how could I belong? If I did not feel, how could I pursue an art career?

Yet something prevented me from stopping. I returned to the pencil. To the brush. To portraits. To what felt honest.

Perhaps I will be criticised by purists. Perhaps I will be labelled commercial. Perhaps I will always stand in between admiration for mastery and confusion in front of certain contemporary works.

But bravery is not imposing taste. Bravery is admitting what you feel and what you do not feel. Bravery is accepting that we do not all see art the same way, and that this difference does not diminish its existence.

I do not want to pretend to understand what I do not.

I do not want to dismiss what I do not connect with.

I want to stand honestly in front of what moves me.

And what moves me, still, are faces. Effort. Craft. Beauty in imperfection. The visible trace of a human being who insisted.

If that makes me naive, then I accept it.

But it is real.