A Collection That Speaks Through Silence

With In The Body, The Word – Voices That Become Image, Amadeo Carvalho presents a collection that refuses to remain quiet. These are not just portraits — they are echoes. Each face, each layer, each stroke, becomes a trace left behind on the surface of time, a refusal to be forgotten.

Born from the ongoing series THE BLACKNESS IN ME STAINS (THE BIMS) II, this collection is both tender and defiant — a whisper that becomes a wound, a wound that becomes a voice. The works are a homage to Black women, to the legacy of their resistance, and to the ways they carry memory in the body.

In Amadeo’s hands, the portrait is not a depiction — it is a territory. Faces appear not as finished representations, but as sites of inscription. Across these canvases, identity is written and re-written, sometimes in bold red, sometimes in nearly invisible lines — always there, always insisting.

The Word That Refuses to Fade

At the heart of this collection lies the tension between visibility and silence. In some works, words explode from the image, breaking through the surface with urgency. In others, the language is veiled, hiding in shadow, but never erased. This is a visual archive of what persists — even when the world looks away.

Inspired by a poem by Érica Silva, the collection takes language not as caption, but as medium. The word is not merely present — it is carved, stained, scorched into the work. The poem is not read; it is felt. It inhabits the canvas as much as the figure does, offering a space where presence is reclaimed through text, gesture, and pigment.

A Shared Body of Memory and Resistance

In The Body, The Word is not a collection in the traditional sense — it is a collective body. These works hold the weight of inherited silence, but also the force of survival. They honour the women who came before, and urge tenderness towards those who will come after.

Carvalho does not just paint — he writes. With flesh and form, with shadow and voice, he marks the canvas as a site of resistance. Each work is an act of remembering, and each memory is an act of defiance.

This is art that stains because it lives. And it lives because it dares to speak — even when the world forgets how to listen.