In Rio de Janeiro in the 1980s, I began an artistic inquiry into the intermediacy between two-dimensional and three-dimensional spaces and their representations. Starting with colorful abstraction, I shifted towards black paint but experimented rarely with figuration. My entry into figuration was not initially intentional: a portrait of a girl contemplating darkness while emerging from a colorful reflection on a lake became an early expression of the undercurrent of my art. ‘Contemplating black’ also relates to my process of searching for intermediacy: in its initial phase, this inquiry culminated in a ‘diagonally open,’ black on black painting on canvas—one of my last paintings while still living in Rio. Only five of the works from this period survived. In 1989, after moving to Berlin, I completed the creation of Diagonal System, an expression of this search, my first conceptual painted work, and an artwork system reorienting our view on spatial logic.