The Urban Paradises paintings are the utopian pools where Martîm unleashes his desire for desire: the liquid state between the suburban plasticity of a Brazil with pores to the sun, and the unexpected sensation of freedom conquered, at least sensorially, on the other side of the Atlantic.

Carrying a childhood marked by modesty and conservatism in his suitcase, and on his skin the nostalgia of the Madeiran exuberance of his ancestors, it is in Brazil on the terraces of Belo Horizonte that Martîm projects his collection of biographical and fictional objects, at the top of urban and social construction. Tops that are literally and symbolically above the mundane. The pool's plastic is much more than the artificiality that coexists with the humidity of the plants or the cement of the ground, it is the very possibility of luxury and whimsy, the border that dilutes the binomial sky and earth, the status of pleasure.
Bodies that do not denounce the gaze of the beholder, but return us to the place of a subject who desires a type of lost desire: not what betrays a lack, but what emanates from all things and circulates between them, like water.
It is in the contrasts between the depth and superficiality of the pool as an abstraction (disguised as a figurative image) that the permanent influence of David Hockney is assumed, through escapism and the appropriation of the liquid metaphor of erotic emancipation.
These bodies exist in exposed intimacy, without temporality, in a free state only, but curiously on a terrace-stage. It is perhaps not by chance that the tension experienced since childhood, between real sensibility and its repression, contributed to Martîm finding a fruitful practice on stage, first as a performer in London, and later in the construction of scenic, three-dimensional and painted objects, at MADAME TEATRO, a company he co-founded with Diego Bragà in Belo Horizonte.

In this series, the theatrical heritage is not restricted to a gesture of composition and expression. It's as if the image were the result of a staging, and the audience were the landscape-seen in the background, the timeless testimony of pleasure. In an apparently contradictory movement, Martîm's painting does not anticipate the expansion of the gesture, but concentrates it. It brings from theatrical experimentation a body that is all bodies and a non-linear time and space, despite the apparent realism. In the delimitation of the stage-screen-pool, in a summoned illusion, as in paradise.

- Mafalda Lencastre