The ubiquity of cameras and digital screens gives the impression that other mediums and forms of image circulation have become obsolete. This is a hasty way of assessing things and reflects the anxiety of our time, which compels us to change constantly. In a world where nothing lasts, what sense is there in coexisting with long-lasting objects such as books, vinyl records, prints, or paintings?

Painting, in fact, has “died” many times. In an epitaph often attributed to French painter Paul Delaroche ("From today, painting is dead!"), it was already said to be on its deathbed in 1839, when Louis Daguerre's photographic device achieved worldwide success.“From that moment on,” wrote poet Charles Baudelaire years later, “this vile society flung itself... into the contemplation of its trivial image on metal. A madness, a fanaticism...”

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Painting not only survived but also transformed and multiplied. It witnessed the arrival of cinema, played a decisive role throughout modernity, coexisted with contemporary art and its new concepts and materials, regained momentum in the 1980s, and entered the 21st century sharing space with the digital. Its resilience is certainly not due to any technical or historical superiority over other media, despite its long tradition in the field of art and an undeniable ability to reinvent itself. Perhaps its survival stems from the fact that it remains a field of experimentation still alive and able to counter immediacy with its expanded sense of time.

This is the realm of Paulo Vieira, a word that feels somewhat out of place here, since this artist’s works are not exactly "spatial" or attempts to
represent a three-dimensional universe on a flat surface. His painting distances itself from mimesis, despite a superb technique that could, at
most, be loosely described as realist. Nor can it be categorized as surrealism, symbolism, or fantasy, terms that do not align with his creative
process or aesthetic concerns. The rigor of his work resists automatism, and esoteric issues are foreign to the exercise in clarity and conciseness that he carries out.

Paulo Vieira’s painting is not illustrative of History or Art Criticism. It speaks of painting itself, a pictorial thinking that needs no argument beyond itsown existence.