Are We There Yet? The Locus Amoenus
Oil on Canvas
2026
Are We There Yet? The Locus Amoenus marks a decisive shift in Jônatas’ contemporary practice, repositioning landscape not as a site of arrival or pastoral refuge, but as a contested field of memory, fracture, and persistence. Executed in oil on canvas, the works abandon the illusionistic assurances of his earlier Spanish Realist vocabulary in favor of a materially driven language that foregrounds process, erasure, and temporal abrasion. Central to this body of work is a rigorously limited chromatic range and a subtractive methodology that employs sandpaper to physically wear down layers of oil paint—a gesture historically resonant yet emphatically contemporary in its insistence on exposure rather than representation. The act of removal operates as both technique and metaphor: a controlled violence enacted upon the surface that mirrors the slow erosion embedded in histories of forced movement, cultural dislocation, and inherited rupture. Out of these scarred pictorial fields emerges a subdued but persistent luminosity, not as transcendence or resolution, but as endurance. The title’s invocation of locus amoenus—traditionally associated with idealized, harmonious landscapes—is deliberately destabilized. Here, the “pleasant place” is deferred, reimagined as an internal and unresolved condition shaped by diasporic experience rather than geographic certainty. The works resonate with the Exodus as a conceptual framework, not as narrative illustration, but as an enduring structure of wandering: a continuum sustained by direction without destination. Though constructed from imagined topographies, these paintings function as affective archives, sedimented with generational movement, cultural memory, and saudade. Situated within the perspective of a contemporary Brazilian-American artist living in exile in France, Are We There Yet? The Locus Amoenus asserts landscape as a site where time, loss, and belonging are negotiated through material resistance rather than visual completion.
The Locus Amoenus: Are We There Yet?
Numbers IX & X, oil on canvas, 130 x 260 cm
Jônatas, Paris, 2026
Numbers IX & X, oil on canvas, 130 x 260 cm
Jônatas, Paris, 2026
Detail: The Locus Amoenus: Are We There Yet?
Numbers VII, oil on canvas, 50 X 30 cm
Jônatas, Paris, 2025
Numbers VII, oil on canvas, 50 X 30 cm
Jônatas, Paris, 2025
The Locus Amoenus: Are We There Yet?
Number III, oil on canvas, 30 x 40 cm
Jônatas, Paris, 2025
Number III, oil on canvas, 30 x 40 cm
Jônatas, Paris, 2025
The Locus Amoenus: Are We There Yet?
Number IX, oil on canvas, 130 x 100 cm
Jônatas, Paris, 2026
Number IX, oil on canvas, 130 x 100 cm
Jônatas, Paris, 2026
The Locus Amoenus: Are We There Yet?
Number IV, oil on canvas, 20 X 40 cm
Jônatas, Paris, 2025
Number IV, oil on canvas, 20 X 40 cm
Jônatas, Paris, 2025
Detail: The Locus Amoenus: Are We There Yet?
Numbers IX & X, oil on canvas, 130 x 260 cm
Jônatas, Paris, 2025
Numbers IX & X, oil on canvas, 130 x 260 cm
Jônatas, Paris, 2025
The Locus Amoenus: Are We There Yet?
Numbers IX & X, oil on Canvas, 30 x 30 cm
Jônatas, Paris, 2025
Numbers IX & X, oil on Canvas, 30 x 30 cm
Jônatas, Paris, 2025
The Locus Amoenus: Are We There Yet?
Number X, oil on canvas, 130 x 100 cm
Jônatas, Paris, 2026
Number X, oil on canvas, 130 x 100 cm
Jônatas, Paris, 2026
The Locus Amoenus: Are We There Yet?
Number V, oil on canvas, 30 x 50 cm
Jônatas, Paris, 2026
Number V, oil on canvas, 30 x 50 cm
Jônatas, Paris, 2026
The Locus Amoenus: Are We There Yet?
Number II, oil on canvas, 20 x 40 cm
Jônatas, Paris, 2025
Number II, oil on canvas, 20 x 40 cm
Jônatas, Paris, 2025
The Locus Amoenus: Are We There Yet?
Number VIII, oil on canvas, 50 x 30 cm
Jônatas, Paris, 2026
Number VIII, oil on canvas, 50 x 30 cm
Jônatas, Paris, 2026
Detail: The Locus Amoenus: Are We There Yet?
Number I, oil on canvas, 20 x 40 cm
Jônatas, Paris, 2025
Number I, oil on canvas, 20 x 40 cm
Jônatas, Paris, 2025