After many years of absence Adao was back in Sao Paulo and we had the rare opportunity of spending some time together. Tall and slim carrying an enormous black leather folder with his latest paintings, he just needed a pincher on a leash - as I jokingly suggested - to become himself part of that world of unique forms that are the very stuff of his art. He does not talk about what he has been doing all these years; he just sits and plunges into that flow of verbal and non-verbal interchange that delights friends who meet again. He goes from topic to topic with the same ease with which he changes colors in his brushes and the feeling that slowly dominates our living room is that one does not have to talk about anything special, nor inform or update each other at all. When we looked at his paintings everything that mattered was there anyway.

From the bookshelf I brought him a drawing diary he had given my wife many years ago and which she had kept with great care. He looked at his old sketches and notes as one would at a family album and here again see how the artist works: his brush is his camera, his images on paper are the record of his thoughts and experiences. I also took him to the corridor to revisit a drawing of Pan embracing two naked women he had done 18 years ago using diluted street pitch for ink - he is a little alchemical also in the literal sense - and a more recent one (nine years old, the last time we met), a quick oil pastel painting he made in front of us depicting a mountain and a snake just because I had at home a nice sheet of handmade Japanese paper. He really loves paper. I was proud to show him that we love his painted papers. He was moved to realize we kept them and then came out with that scene in Harold and Maude in which she throws into the water a ring the boy had just given her saying, "so I forever know where it lies." These words of he came out as part of that flow of interchange I just referred to above, but there was more to them, the god of the moment wanted them to be a bridge to his giving us one of his most beautiful paper drawings so he would also know where his ring lay.

He had come to our house so we could look quietly at his art and I would try to think a few comments I could possibly make for a future catalogue for an exhibition he might have next year in the States. As he just sate there, I unzipped the huge black folder and began unfolding the delicate papers that were like samples of precious silk brought from China to foreign lands in a merchant's handbag. Or then they felt to my hands as veils, gauze, bark of tree trunks, butterfly wings. I also plunged into the flow. Tape from the drawer. One piece I hang on a white wall (our walls are still bare white, so they served by purpose of turning them into walls of an art gallery), another over the sofa, yet another, in real silk paper, I left hanging from a door arch lit from the back. This is the wonder of art and he who lives by it: our everyday sitting room was all of a sudden dressed up for a ball of fairies. What pleasure for the soul, what emotion! Blue djins dancing in an Arabian desert. A mountain that opens up to receive sacred scriptures from the sky as it gives birth to these same scripts from its own belly. Black drawings over fields of nacre. Alchemical gold emerging from nigredo and faeces. The double ax of an African god. Minotaur's labyrinth. Blue over white lace. The innermost hidden place where the Animal lives inside a man's unconsciousness.

Like the genie back into the lamp, his paintings went back to the black folder, and as we walked to his car I thought of the hidden worlds of beauty, love in plenitude that have always been closer to us than we are used to believing.