The hand appears in Miguel Ângelo Marques’s work almost as an inevitable presence. It functions, in both two and three dimensions, as a record of memory and, simultaneously, as a mirror of a more intimate, personal narrative. It becomes body and image simultaneously. It emerges as an obsession within an individual narrative. By continually reappearing, the hand operates as both motif and evidence: an insistent fragment that returns to reactivate images.

In Your Words Cut Me Like An Arrow, Miguel Ângelo Marques presents an image that is both brutal and ritualistic. The wound here is not confined to pain. There is a violence that comes from the word, its weight and its precision; the word that cuts, that pierces, that punctures. Pierced by an arrow, the hand does not recoil. It remains exposed, suspended in that moment of impact. The arrow cuts through space and passes through flesh, leaving an inscription. The wound is not only pain: it is also gesture, drawing, and ritual. It is the word inscribed in the body, giving the violence of the impact a possibility of meaning.