Duda Libman

Artist Statement

Philip Guston once said, “I think a painter has two choices: he paints the world or himself.” My practice refuses this separation. I paint the world as a way of finding myself within it.

I do not begin with an image. I begin with what resists it: a piece of wood, a scratched surface, a fragment that has already lived another form. Working with found materials, rock, and accumulated surfaces, I engage in what I understand as a form of material intelligence, allowing the conditions of the support to guide what becomes visible rather than imposing an image upon it.

This way of working is rooted in my experience of moving from Brazil to London. My works are translations: of landscapes I photograph, of inner searches I cannot name directly, and of the boundary between what is felt and what can be seen. Landscape, in this context, is not scenery but emotional cartography: a record of how place, memory, and displacement shape inner life.

Spatially, the practice has expanded from individual panels towards installation and floor-based configurations in which meaning is constructed through proximity, the viewer’s movement, and the intervals between elements - what the Japanese concept of “ma”understands as the active space between things.

The image is not instantly given. It asks to be entered.