TD - Tempero Diabetico [1985] - Fragmented Serenity

TD - Tempero Diabético, born in 1985, Portuguese and urban artist since 1999.
Fragmented Serenity is a hand-painted work on cotton canvas, with spray and some details in acrylic marker ink, dated 2026, image size 161x96 cm. Hand-signed on the back with an acrylic-ink pen. Collector's item in perfect condition, sold directly by the artist and accompanied by COA, a hand-signed and stamped certificate of authenticity. Shipped rolled in a cardboard tube by courier.

“Fragmented Serenity” Fragmented serenity in unsettling brushstrokes, suggesting introspection and dispersed identity

I am a urban artist, street-formed, through mistakes and persistence. Since 1999 graffiti has been part of my body and my way of seeing the world. I started on walls, in public spaces, in the fast pace of the city, and it was there that I developed my own language—raw and intuitive. Over time, this language spilled 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 attention deficit as the most marked trait of how I function. For many years I saw this as an obstacle: the difficulty of maintaining focus, the erratic attention, the mind always bouncing from stimulus to stimulus. Painting was a constant struggle against myself, an attempt to discipline something that by nature refuses to stay quiet. When I am painting, my attention is random and intermittent, sometimes deeply immersed in the image, sometimes completely absent, as if I were already in another painting, another idea, another wall.

Over time, I stopped trying to correct this functioning and began listening to it. It was then that I realized something essential: for me, a painting is not completed at the traditional end of the process. There is a point, somewhere between 60 and 65%, at which the work reaches its most honest state. It is at this moment that the image still breathes, still promises, still does not close in on itself. After that, the pleasure disappears. Continuing would be merely meeting an external expectation of finish, not a true internal need.

I decided then to transform what I had years considered a limitation at the base of my artistic process. My canvases began to present themselves as unfinished, not by 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 is missing, nothing is extra.

After fifteen years fighting ADHD, I understood that it is not the enemy of my work, but its raw material. Fragmented attention shapes rhythm, interruptions create layers, and the inability to stay too long in the same image prevents overcontrol. 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 starts 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 finish. I seek the exact moment when the painting is still open, as I always have been: incomplete, in motion, and deeply alive.