L’Homme de Brasilia is a work created specifically for my exhibition Brasília. De Carne e Alma that was held in Brasilia at the Rubem Valentim Gallery in the Cultural Space Renato Russo 508 Sul, on the occasion of the 2010 city’s Jubilee official celebrations.That painting evoked Philippe de Broca's wonderful movie That Man From Rio. In a certain way its purpose was to say farewell to the city that inspired me so much and for so long.
French director Broca’s movie completely marked me ; its influence was decisive in the fascination that Brasilia aroused in my mind and heart.

Broca’s vision of Brasilia is a unique legacy and, in my opinion, a highly poetic vision. This, inspite of the hectic pace of the film, its twists and surprises. Or even the humor, good spirit and high voltage energy displayed by the character of Adrien (impersonated by Jean-Paul Belmondo), that always seem to take precedence over the dreamy distance which the stunning images of the city favor. When the film was shot, the city only had between two or three years of age and was still a construction site. Thus Broca's vision inspired me this painting where Adrien-Belmondo runs and runs always and ever through the draft city, a dusty disembodied blueprint of Brasilia which then standed on the red soil of the Cerrado like an empty shell.

My intention was to to show a man running as if he was leaving the city. The painting thus expressed a symbol of the end of my own work inspired by the capital of Brazil.

However, I realized while painting that finally it was much unclear whether that man was running out of town, or if he was heading to it.
And I saw in this ambiguity an ultimate message from Brasilia, which would borrow for the occasion the closing words of Paprika Plains, the extraordinary jazz-rock symphony by Joni Mitchell. In this composition, the musician whose work made me become a painter referred to the North American Mesas’s red dust and the native Indians there driven by despair and expelled by White Man’ greed out of their lands.  Just as Niemeyer spoke, in his own time, about the Cerrado’s red dust and the Candangos builders' misery, who had become indesirable in the newly inaugurated Brasilia, after they had finished constructing it.

Joni Mitchell’s masterpiece of music never ceased to accompany me in my perception of the Cerrado, and that of the white concrete flower that steadily grew on it during the last fifty years: "No matter what you do, I’m floating back, I’m floating back to you".

I realized then why I had made this painting.
I understood that I had come full circle.

As it became clear to me, even though I had left now the capital of Brazil for new horizons, that I always would come back to Brasilia in my dreams. Forever. And ever.