TD - Tempero Diabetico [1985] - Sabedoria Incompleta

TD - Diabetic Seasoning of 1985, Portuguese and urban artist since 1999.
Incompleta Wisdom is a hand-painted work on cotton canvas, 100% sprayed in the year 2026, with an image size of 158x101 cm. Hand-signed on the back with acrylic ink pen. Collector’s item in perfect condition, sold directly by the artist and accompanied by a COA, a hand-signed and stamped certificate of authenticity. Shipped rolled in a cardboard tube via courier.

- Incomplete Wisdom is a work that shows the giant gaze that questions light, color, and silence. -

I am a street art artist, trained on the street, in error and persistence. Since 1999, graffiti has been part of my body and my way of thinking about the world. I started on walls, in public spaces, in the city’s fast pace, and it was there that I developed a language of my own, raw and intuitive. Over time, this language overflowed onto canvases, keeping spray as the main tool, not as decorative technique, but as a direct extension of gesture, urgency, and embraced imperfection.

I live with ADHD, with inattentiveness being the most marked trait of how I function. For many years I saw this as an obstacle: the difficulty in maintaining focus, erratic attention, a mind always jumping from stimulus to stimulus. Painting was a constant struggle against myself, an attempt to discipline something that, by nature, resists staying still. My attention, when I am painting, is random and intermittent, sometimes deeply immersed in the image, other times completely absent, as if I were already on another painting, another idea, another wall.

With time, I stopped trying to fix this functioning and began listening to it. It was there that I realized something essential: for me, a painting does not reach completion at the traditional end of the process. There is a point, somewhere between 60 and 65%, where the work attains its most honest state. It is at this moment that the image still breathes, still promises, still has not closed in on itself. After that, the pleasure disappears. Continuing would be merely meeting an external finishing expectation, not a personal necessity.

I then decided to transform what I had long considered a limitation at the base of my artistic process. My canvases began to present themselves as unfinished, not due to carelessness, but by conscious choice. The unfinished is, for me, a place of truth. It is where the gesture is still alive, where the error has not yet been hidden, where the viewer’s gaze is invited to complete, imagine, project. When I look at a canvas at that intermediate point, I see it as finished, nothing missing, nothing extra.

After fifteen years of fighting against attention deficit, I understood that it is not the enemy of my work, but its raw material. Fragmented attention shapes the rhythm, interruptions create layers, and the inability to stay too long on the same image prevents over-control. The pathology, once seen as a flaw, has become a creative ally. Today, I paint embracing my own mental flow, letting it determine when a work begins and, above all, when it ends.

My work lives in this unstable balance between impulse and absence, between what is said and what remains unsaid. I do not seek perfection or classical finishing. I seek the exact moment when the painting is still open, as I have always been: incomplete, in motion, and deeply alive.