The artist who carves the shape of light

Joe Lima remembers the exact moment his artistic practice clicked into place: He was working on a drawing exercise, sketching the linear quality of a dome, when he spotted a small woodblock print of a balloon in an art book.

"That's when it hit me," he says, standing in his Saint Henri studio surrounded by massive carved wooden blocks the size of grand paintings. "I said to myself, it's so interesting how clear this is. How precise this is."

That was the beginning of something entirely new in contemporary art—large-scale woodblock carvings that blur the line between sculpture and printmaking, between the familiar and the unsettling. Lima's pieces, some standing over six feet tall, transform everyday spaces into something altogether more mysterious.

"What you see here is the shape of the light"

Lima works with the methodical precision of a medieval craftsman. Each piece begins with a photograph or collage drawn from piles of archival print he's collected over the years, usually combining multiple sources—a classroom in France, an abandoned hotel in the Azores, a carnival figure from Portugal. But the real work happens in the drawing phase, which can take up to three months for a single piece.

"What you see here is the shape of the light," he explains, pointing to a preparatory sketch covered in white marks. "Everything that is white gets carved. I don't draw the black. I just draw that shape there—the negative, the light of the image."

The carving itself takes another month and a half. "I can't make a mistake," Lima says. "There's no way I can go back. I would have to use wood filler."

This preference speaks to something deeper about his work—its relationship to time and craft in an increasingly digital world. Each piece represents months of labour, thousands of precise cuts, decisions that can't be undone.

He works entirely by hand, creating depth through what he calls "pixelizing"—thousands of tiny carved marks that, from a distance, resolve into faces, architectural details, atmospheric perspective.

"It's sculpting light," he says. "You're actually creating the space of what light is reflected on, not the positive, the negative part."

The artists' patron of cheap rent

Lima arrived in Montreal in 1987, drawn initially by Concordia University and something almost unimaginable by today's standards: affordability. "We couldn't believe the prices," he recalls. "Artists could live in a 3,000 square foot place for $300. And that was why I stayed."

Born in the Azores in 1963, Lima had studied at Fanshawe College in London, Ontario, where British instructors maintained a rigorous European approach to art education. "You started with 40 students and ended up with 10," he says. "If you weren't an artist, you didn't make it."

But Montreal offered something different—creative freedom enabled by economic possibility. "There was a lot of openness to creativity. Artists could live in their spaces, still creating." The city's history as a centre for contemporary Canadian art, from Riopelle to the Automatistes, helped encourage an environment where experimental work could flourish.

"What's great about Montreal is that freedom that you could work, because your rent was so low," he says. It's a freedom that shaped not just his career, but his entire artistic philosophy. Things are different now, he laments, but the spirit remains.

While Lima has found success exhibiting in Portugal and other European venues, he remains deeply connected to Montreal's artistic ecosystem. His studio in a shared artist building maintains the collaborative spirit that first drew him to the city. Regular "syndicats" bring together artists from throughout the building for wine, food, and conversation about their work.

"It's a great community here," he says, though he acknowledges the challenges of selling contemporary art in Montreal compared to Europe. "In Europe, they have a tradition of art, a huge tradition of history. They look at artists very highly in terms of their reputation in the community."

Still, Montreal shaped him as an artist in ways that continue to influence his work. The city's blend of old and new, its comfort with ambiguity and cultural mixing, mirrors his own artistic approach of combining disparate elements into something entirely fresh.

Surreal spaces, familiar fears

Lima's work operates in the uncanny valley of architectural space. His pieces feature lecture halls where equations float above seated figures, cathedral ceilings reversed and reflected, office buildings populated by figures with animal heads. The effect is instantly recognizable yet deeply unsettling.

"I always kind of let the viewer be in spaces that are not really recognizable, but recognizable," he explains. "It's like in the world of dreams—you know where you are, but then everything is not really where it should be."

This approach traces back to a childhood experience that still influences his work. As a boy visiting a farm in the Azores, he was told not to venture into the nearby forest. Naturally, he went anyway. "I saw people there and it wasn't a dream," he recalls. "I got that kind of creepiness about it—that everything could be so beautiful but if you go into this mystery world, you don't know what you're gonna find."

That tension between beauty and unease permeates his work. "Beauty with uneasiness is always my thing," he says. "I want them to engage in it. I really want to do art that people can really stay in front of for a little longer."

Thousands of precise cuts

Lima's woodblocks present collectors with an unusual choice. Each carved block can produce exactly one print before the delicate carved surfaces become clogged with ink. "If you want the print, the block gets destroyed," he explains. "You can't do any more printing from it."

Most clients, he's discovered, prefer the blocks themselves. "People don't like the prints as much. They love the physicality of the block. There's something about that wood and its weight, its presence on a wall."

This preference speaks to something deeper about his work—its relationship to time and craft in an increasingly digital world. Each piece represents months of labour, thousands of precise cuts, decisions that can't be undone.

"I need people to, when they see it, be familiar with what they're seeing... but I want them to engage with it," he says. "We're bombarded by images, and if you could do an image that provides a refuge from all that, it's a big task."

Focus, craft, and mystery

At 60, Lima is entering a new phase of his practice. He's planning a series of landscape paintings featuring blackened trees with red petals scattered beneath—imagery inspired by environmental destruction but filtered through his characteristically indirect approach. "It would always be indirect, but there will be elements of nature which have a little darkness to them."

The shift represents a slight movement toward more recognizable imagery, though still filtered through his surreal sensibility. "I'm going to start reproducing certain imagery that other people can relate to more," he explains.

But his core philosophy remains unchanged. In an art world increasingly focused on quick consumption and theoretical frameworks, Lima continues to believe in the power of sustained looking, of craft, of mystery.

"Most people won't stay in front of art today for more than three seconds," he observes. "So I feel like I want to do art that people can really stay in front of for a little longer, and take a little bit of time feeling its presence."

It's a position that could only be as quietly radical as it is at a time like now—the idea that art should slow us down rather than speed us up, that mystery matters more than explanation, that the hand and eye working together over months can create something no algorithm could replicate.

In his studio, surrounded by carved blocks that took half a year each to complete, Lima continues sculpting light one careful cut at a time. The work demands patience from both artist and viewer—a quality that feels increasingly precious in our accelerated world.