There are afternoons that never truly end. They remain somewhere, suspended between what was and what comes next — in the light falling obliquely through a window, in the quiet of a familiar interior, in the way someone sits doing nothing in particular and that becomes everything. There is no event, nothing spectacular happens. It is simply a presence. And that is precisely where the attraction and the pleasure come from — from that personal moment.

“The Girl on the Red Sofa” emerged from one such moment. Not from a cold, constructed idea, but from that sensation you recognize immediately when you live it — that something is worth stopping, that if you don’t catch it now, it disappears. The red sofa dominates the composition, almost claiming it entirely. But this red is not aggressive — it is warm, almost domestic, the red of an interior, of an ordinary day, of a lived-in space. The girl’s figure does not stand apart from it, nor does it try to. It belongs to it, just like the plants climbing in the background, like the window open toward the outside, like the expressive black line that connects everything without truly separating anything — though abstracted, the presence of the room’s elements remains there. Everything flows together, interior with exterior, figure with space, the present with an older state of mind, close to nostalgia.

This work might belong to a series I began without knowing I was beginning one. I called it “Afternoon” — a group of works connected not by a concept formulated in advance, but by a shared state of being. Compositional portraits, busts, acrylics on canvas and charcoal drawings, all gravitating around the same hour of the day, the same quality of light, the same presences that return. There were nine works in total, each with its own rhythm, each captured in that imprecise interval between noon and evening, when time seems to have lost its urgency.

Context made four of them leave — it seems they found another place, in other homes, where those who saw them felt a resonance strong enough to make them feel their own, before I had finished thinking about whether the series was ready. Those that remain continue to live together, even scattered, even without ever being in the same place — they coexist.

Now this “Girl on the Red Sofa” is one of them and, if I think about it carefully, I don’t believe she will ever be the last.