About me
Toni Filipe Gonçalves Barreiros
"When I was a young man going to the university of architecture, I didn´t attend lectures in the afternoon.
The reason was that I was too busy visiting na anarchic painter friend of mine. At the time this man seemed old to me, but he knew a lot about contemporary painting. My painter friend had lived in Vienna, and in Munich in Der Blaue Reiter days; and he had even lived in Paris…
I was eager to learn.
At home I did watercolours on my own, and used to take them over to get his opinion.
My painter-sage friend used to say nothing. He would talk about other things but then, bit by bit he would tell me stories which, if I was alert enough, should have made me realise what was wrong with my watercolours.
He didn´t offer me notions. He offered me thoughts.
Only once, when I had squeezed a lemon yellow straight out of a tube, my painter friend said to me: “Look, Sottsass, you can´t use a yellow like that”. And I said: “But I saw it in a painting by Matisse”, and he simply replied: “When Matisse painted that yellow he was 50. you. Sottsass, are 18”.
What my painter friend was giving me was not a “notion”. He was encouraging me to think about all the things that come before and behind the notion. He was encouraging me to tread by myself on complicated ground, on ground that wasn´t clear, on the unknown grounds of existence; he was encouraging me to ask myself questions, to train myself to think... He was encouraging me not to be content with what was written on that tube of paint. “Lemon yellow” is not enough."Ettore Sottsass ( Extract from a speech given at the Royal College of Art/ London 1999 ).
