Droit de suite (Right to follow), 2026

Alex Červený

Alex Červený: Hunger for love, thirst to live, and the right to be. I live and work in São Paulo, where I was born, raised, and became an artist. And I think it was the deep discomfort I felt within the official education system that pushed me toward practical life, where I worked as an assistant in artists’ studios, printmaking workshops, independent art schools, and also as an illustrator in the publishing world.
 
My interest in history, religion, cinema, television, handicrafts, and the travels I’ve taken all helped shape the artist I am. Droit de suite is a law within the art trade that is not always respected, and it serves as the title for this painting. However, this expression, when translated literally from French into Portuguese, can also be read as “the right to move forward,” which, to me, is connected to a more primordial right: the elemental right to exist.
 
Thus, I think Droit de suite is a votive painting, an altarpiece devoted to the freedom to be. It is also the result of the immense pleasure I find in the manual act of painting.
Describing the painting: in the central circle, there is a child with adult features –
 bearded, aged – walking hand in hand with two amorphous entities, one male and the other female.
 
They are in an ideal garden. Behind them stands a tree heavy with yellow fruit, and attached to the ends of its branches are white ribbons bearing Instagram handles suggested by the Instagram algorithm. The circles at the sides, meanwhile, contain a great diversity of information and, among them, the principal stars visible in the skies of the Southern Hemisphere on the left and the Northern Hemisphere on the right, as if they were mental projections divided into two floating reservoirs of memory.
 
The work began in 2023. It then evolved slowly until the appearance of the three central figures in August 2025. From that point on, in an almost daily ritual, I would sit before the easel waiting for revelations – images, ornaments, and texts that might occupy all the empty spaces inside and outside those circles.
 
What first revealed itself was a kind of mystical musical marriage, along with the antagonistic, tragic presences of the singers Patsy Cline and Elvis Presley. Then came the painterly grandeur of the Byzantine painters Eutychios and Michael Astrapas, and the artistic traditions of Thessaloniki and Orthodox art.
 
After that came the poetry contained in the texts printed on bottles of luxury cosmetic products, as well as micro-landscapes of imaginary places, significant events of the twentieth century, gentle erotic impulses, among many other things.