Ana Aragão in the words of Joaquim Pinto Vieira

Read the full text in portuguese, here .

THE SHIP OF AWE, as I call this work, is an extraordinary drawing exercise by Ana Aragão, whom I taught Drawing to at FAUP. Ana Aragão is a drawing artist. A conspicuous draughtswoman. A very rare thing. In an era where discourses on gender are in vogue, I, a man, have no doubt that only a woman could create this piece—as with all of her already vast body of hand-drawn work, as she always insists on saying. I know exactly what that means, since I also draw every day. I acknowledge that patience, steadiness, calmness, a fondness for repetition, and attention to detail are feminine traits. Jung once said that deep within a man there is a woman, and within a woman, a man—and in this case, I can only imagine how he "suffers."

Awe relates as much to the good as to the bad, the ugly or the beautiful. We are left stunned, surprised, unsettled, anxious… When I saw the image of the object—which I immediately associated with the great ships of the Portuguese from the 1500s and onwards—I was apprehensive. I noticed that instead of floating on water, it was sailing through an indistinct sky, at eye level. It seems threatened by a wave—perhaps a tsunami?—approaching from the right, ready to engulf it. A fleeting awe? I imagined it appearing above Avenida da Boavista as I descended toward the sea, floating a hundred meters in the air. Would I flee in panic or climb aboard, eager to see what it carried?

Screens, like Japanese and Chinese panels, were once one of my greatest artistic passions. So I’ll consider the piece as a drawing of unusual dimensions. I tried, in vain, to find a meaning. But if you look into a forest at all the countless plants and creatures, you don’t find a clear meaning either. Art is expected to do just that. A work should have meaning. But 150 years ago, art abandoned that requirement. Jung—whose words and ideas I find helpful—showed how the discovery of the Unconscious, a vast and incomprehensible mental reality, was the engine of that brutal conceptual shift. Many among us don’t understand that the Unconscious is just as real as the Conscious.

But what underpins this drawing—and perhaps all of Ana’s work? She “lives within the unconscious.” And since works of art emerge without a dictated meaning, it falls to us to create that meaning. Just as we might say a walk through a senseless forest was nonetheless wonderful.

This drawing, like perhaps all of Aragão’s work, places representation confronting abstraction. By this I mean that representation shows what exists in reality, and abstraction only what exists in the mind. For example, the letter A, the number 27, a square, etc.—these are abstractions. All abstract drawing treats the non-existent as its reference. It is its own reference.

I’ll also approach the work through two realms that only exist in representation: the aesthetic/formal/plastic realm, and then the iconic/semantic/emotional realm.

In the first, the spatial representation of the super-object is extremely meticulous. Ana knows, at least from Drawing at FAUP, what the horizon line and eye level are. And the viewer’s gaze aligns with the deck. This implies that everything above is seen from below, and everything below is seen from above. This is expressively very appealing, convincing, and emotionally effective. We feel the three-dimensionality of the space attached to the object, and the plausibility of implausible elements.

The drawing is entirely linear, although at times the accumulation of small strokes may deceive the eye. Light does not exist here—another hallmark of abstraction. The subtlety of the graphic marks in creating patterns is delicate and confident. The information about the nature of the objects remains consistent whether slightly closer or slightly farther away. Everything exists on a single plane: the paper. Abstraction.

The density or tension of the line aims to be constant, and when it is not, it has no formal or expressive effect. The use of gold leaf applications—like those seen in the Nanban panels at MNSR and in the later Rinpa school screens from the Edo period in Japan—is a legitimate aesthetic association.

In the iconic plane—the realm of representation—things gain symbolic and metaphorical dimensions. In the works of Aragão I know, including this one, she only represents architectonic objects, ordinary items, fabrics, and some dead trees. There’s a vague suggestion of a bird, particularly in the depiction of pines like those found in Nanban screens. Animals, plants, and humans do not appear. With irony or perhaps a touch of mischief—but without insult—it’s as if a neutron bomb had fallen. Were that not the case, I would not hesitate to mention the work of Bosch, Brueghel, and countless illustrators of dystopias and science fiction that flood online platforms. But that’s also the strength and uniqueness of this drawing.

I know what it is to draw without thinking. Drawing is the marvel of bringing forth, with a simple mark-making tool, a suggestion of the real that gradually gains life, meaning, and significance—without the author being the "owner" of that action. Writers describe this as characters taking over. Aragão’s imagination is overwhelming, even within thematic zones, but also when she moves into other thematic groups. At such times, I too know how one can feel indecisive and uneasy. But that’s what drawing demands—so that it may like us, and we may enjoy doing it.

If someone with severe nearsightedness looks at the image, they might see the drawing of a ship with some rather unusual accessories inside and around it. But as nearsighted people see well up close, they will be awestruck by what they find. Those with normal vision must balance that awe with attention to the value of the whole, and the value of every single centimeter of the image. And there are thousands of them.

Where are—and who were—the creators of this ship, more surreal than the one that appeared with no crew near Gibraltar in the 19th century and gave rise to the ghost ship myth? In those houses—reminding me of the red neighborhood of Larung Gar in Sichuan—positioned where the galleons had their cannons, and in those long rectangular sleeves that evoke jellyfish propelling themselves forward, lie some of the intriguing phenomena found throughout the drawing.

Take a good look!

text by Joaquim Pinto Vieira

August 2025