There are artists who leave a place and spend the rest of their lives escaping it. And there are others for whom departure becomes another form of return: the farther they travel, the more insistently the first landscape inhabits them. Distance does not diminish the place of origin; it distills it. Memory removes the incidental and preserves the essential—the angle of light upon a wall, the violence and tenderness of the sea, the blackness of volcanic stone, the solitude of an island horizon, the gestures of childhood, the voices that disappear yet somehow continue speaking inside us. António Dacosta belongs to this second lineage. To look at his painting only through the convenient classifications of twentieth-century art is therefore to see him incompletely. Surrealism may describe a moment, an affinity, a vocabulary; it cannot contain the whole man. Behind the movements and techniques, behind Paris and Lisbon, behind the periods of creation and silence, another geography persisted: Terceira, the Azores, the island remembered from elsewhere. It is precisely this intimate geography that Assunção Melo has spent more than twenty-five years studying, and which now crosses another frontier with the publication in English of Between Silence and Vision — António Dacosta and the Sense of Belonging in Painting, published by Bruma Publications at California State University, Fresno, and Letras Lavadas.
The English edition is much more than the translation of an art-historical study. It is an act of cultural passage. The book derives from Melo’s doctoral thesis, defended in 2021 and published in Portuguese in 2024 by the Instituto Histórico da Ilha Terceira as António Dacosta e Sentido de Pertença na Pintura: Motivações, Resistências e Inovações. The English volume is a condensed version, its title slightly transformed for another linguistic and cultural world. For Melo, seeing it appear in English is both an honor and a responsibility, undertaken without illusions about the specialized nature of scholarly publishing. Yet specialized books sometimes accomplish something that more widely consumed publications cannot: they alter the intellectual map upon which an artist is encountered. Dacosta already possesses, as Melo rightly observes, an established place in the history of art. What changes here is the geography of his reception. English allows his work to move beyond the linguistic territory in which much of its critical interpretation has remained concentrated, opening it more fully to scholars, students, museums and readers for whom Portuguese has previously been an impassable border. For, as many have said in the past, translation, at its best, is precisely this: not the replacement of one language by another, but the widening of a room.
As the translator of this book, that widening carried a particular responsibility and a particular pleasure. There are texts one translates principally for meaning, and others in which meaning itself is inseparable from cultural memory. Assunção Melo’s study belongs decidedly to the latter. Words such as island, belonging, memory, distance, silence, landscape and insularity may appear perfectly translatable, yet anyone formed by island experience understands that their emotional architecture changes according to who speaks them. An island is geography, certainly, but it is also psychology. It is departure and return, enclosure and horizon, intimacy and exile. To translate a study of António Dacosta therefore required something more than terminological equivalence; it required listening for the Azores beneath the English sentence. Melo entrusted that dimension of the work to me precisely because, as she generously explains in the interview, she believed that someone who knows the islands from both presence and distance might understand the cultural nuances that had to survive the crossing. She invokes José Saramago’s beautiful proposition that one must leave the island in order to see the island. Translation performs something similar: we leave one language so that, from the shore of another, we may see the first more clearly.
That principle is particularly appropriate to Dacosta because Melo’s central argument challenges the comfortable reduction of the painter to surrealism. Her methodology refuses to treat the work as an autonomous object floating above biography, society and place. Instead, she approaches Dacosta through what she calls a Geography of Art: the understanding that creation emerges from lived experience and that an artist’s visual language cannot always be separated from the places, memories, historical circumstances and emotional inheritances through which that artist became himself. Dacosta, she argues, was an artist of continuous reinvention, changing his expression as his reading of his own life changed. His silences matter. So do the telluric visions of Terceira. His images and even the semantics of his titles resist the notion that painting can be entirely severed from origin. From distance and memory, he painted recollections, visions and emotions.
There is something profoundly Azorean in that proposition. The islands have always produced identities shaped simultaneously by rootedness and displacement. To be born on an island is to learn geography unusually early. The sea teaches the child that there is an elsewhere. The horizon is both boundary and invitation. Ships disappear beyond it; airplanes rise through it; relatives cross it; letters once arrived from beyond it; emigrants return across it speaking altered languages and carrying the evidence of other worlds. An islander learns, perhaps before having the vocabulary to articulate it, that belonging does not necessarily mean remaining. Sometimes belonging becomes most intense precisely through absence.
Dacosta’s art can consequently be understood not as provincial because it bears the imprint of Terceira, but as universal because it possesses somewhere from which to speak. This is one of the most compelling ideas emerging from Melo’s interview. She questions the easy contemporary rhetoric of the “global village,” arguing that however interconnected technology may make us, human beings continue to belong first to concrete places. Only from those places do we speak outward. The universal is not necessarily produced by eliminating the local; very often it is reached by penetrating the local deeply enough to discover what it contains of the human condition. She recalls Tolstoy’s familiar injunction that to become universal one should paint one’s own village. In Dacosta’s case, the village becomes island, memory, childhood, Atlantic light—and eventually an artistic language capable of exceeding all of them.
This tension between place and universality acquires an extraordinary poignancy in the English edition through the presence of Álamo Oliveira, whose preface now carries the additional gravity of farewell. Melo recalls that Oliveira agreed to write it only four months before his death and sent the text to her on April 1, 2025. She knew the effort it demanded of him. Friendship, generosity and her own insistence brought the words into existence, and she now believes the preface may have been among the last texts he wrote. What might otherwise have served simply as an introduction to a scholarly volume has therefore become something much more intimate: a literary testament.
At its center stands a paradox worthy of both Oliveira and Dacosta: “Art has no geography.”
At first the sentence appears almost to contradict Melo’s argument. Her study insists upon geography, upon belonging, upon Terceira, upon the impossibility of completely separating the painting from the human life that produced it. Yet Oliveira’s sentence ultimately completes rather than negates that argument. Art has no geography because the artist does. The work can cross borders precisely because the creator has inhabited a particular place intensely enough to transform its specificity into form, color, image and emotion. The island enters the canvas, but the canvas does not remain imprisoned on the island. It travels. Someone who has never seen Terceira can stand before Dacosta and feel something recognizable—not because geography has disappeared, but because geography has been transformed into human experience.
This is also why the publication of Between Silence and Vision in English matters beyond the reputation of a single painter. The Azores have too often been narrated internationally as landscape before they are understood as culture: volcanoes, hydrangeas, whales, crater lakes, dramatic coastlines, Atlantic weather. All of this is real, all of it beautiful, but an archipelago is more than its scenery. Islands also think. They paint, write, compose, remember, argue and reinvent themselves. They generate intellectual traditions and aesthetic languages. They produce artists whose work belongs not merely to “regional culture,” that frequently patronizing category into which the center deposits what it does not quite know how to absorb, but to the larger conversations of European and world culture.
Making Dacosta more accessible in English consequently means allowing another Azorean voice to enter those conversations without asking permission from geography.
There is another beautiful dimension to Melo’s relationship with Dacosta: after more than a quarter century of research, knowledge has not produced closure. Quite the opposite. She has reached one of the most mature recognitions available to scholarship—the understanding that serious study does not necessarily make its subject smaller by explaining it. Sometimes knowledge enlarges mystery. She may exhaust her own time and strength, Melo observes, but she cannot exhaust the artist. Every encounter reveals another Dacosta. His work refuses stasis because the painter himself resisted it. He sought conversation with the artistic currents and generations around him while simultaneously pursuing an authenticity of his own, becoming especially singular during the final decade of his life. He possessed the rare courage not to imitate even himself.
What a magnificent definition of artistic integrity that is: the courage not to become one’s own imitation.
Perhaps this is why Dacosta remains so alive. Categories eventually harden; living art does not. Surrealist, modernist, Portuguese, Azorean, European, insular, emigrant of the imagination—each designation illuminates something and conceals something else. The artist continues escaping the frame erected around him. Assunção Melo does not attempt to end that escape. Her scholarship instead gives us a richer vocabulary with which to accompany it. Belonging becomes not a label but a method of inquiry: What landscapes survive within an artist after departure? What memories become image? What silences become form? How much of childhood remains concealed inside mature creation? How does distance rearrange the homeland? And can one ever truly leave an island once the island has become part of one’s imaginative grammar?
For Melo, the ideal foreign reader will first discover the aesthetic force of a universal painter. But she hopes that initial encounter will provoke another desire: to know the human being behind the brush, to follow the paths that formed his vision until, eventually, those paths lead back toward their beginning—the Azores. Dacosta’s universality, in this reading, was not achieved despite his roots but through them, through the light and silences of his native island. The journey through art ultimately becomes a journey toward life.
And perhaps that is where Between Silence and Vision finds its deepest meaning.
A book leaves Terceira in one language and arrives in another. A painter leaves an island, yet the island continues traveling within him. A scholar spends twenty-five years pursuing an artist and discovers that the closer she approaches, the deeper he becomes. A dying poet writes a preface and leaves behind a final meditation on the placelessness of art. A translation crosses the Atlantic through Bruma Publications at Fresno State and Letras Lavadas, connecting an Azorean painter to readers who may never have stood before the volcanic interior of Terceira, never watched Atlantic light disappear over an island horizon, never understood why distance can sometimes make a place more present rather than less.
Yet perhaps they will understand Dacosta. And perhaps, through Dacosta, they will understand something of the Azores. Because the great paradox of belonging is that the deepest roots do not prevent movement. They make movement meaningful. The island does not diminish when the artist enters the world; it expands through him. The local does not disappear into the universal; it becomes one of the paths by which universality is reached.
Somewhere between silence and vision, António Dacosta understood this. Assunção Melo has spent a quarter of a century listening for it. And now, in another language, the conversation travels farther across the sea.
Written by Diniz Borges based on a interview given and published by Diário Insular. Photos from JEdgardo Vieira.
A few other images of the event thanks to Photographer JEdgardo Vieira.
