My art is about line and space / chaos and order. The search for this visual metaphor drove me into working with stone, in what has become, perhaps, my personal quest for the "philosophers stone". I start by looking at each rock to seek for its inner structure. These sculptures result from a similar building process, where the intersection of lines cut through the irregular formless matter revealing a secret structure embedded within each individual stone. By doing so, a new visual dimension created by matter and the absence of matter is revealed, as if each sculpture was made of individual building blocks organized to create an abstract entity or system and the combination of these units were the key to what defines the sculptural shape and ultimately the original untouched rock, as a group of things or parts connected in some way so as to form a whole.


Daniel Oliveira