Martinho Dias was born in 1968 in Sto. Tirso. He currently lives in Trofa, where he has a studio.
He has a master's degree in Fine Arts – Painting, from the Faculty of Fine Arts of Porto.
It is not possible to remain indifferent to Martinho Dias' painting. He captures your gaze, if nothing else because of the unusual break of formal environments he offers us. The dissonant element [...] introduces a caricatural and political dimension that arouses an interpretive gaze. And those who see must reflect, even if art, as Freud intended, may be incomprehensible and enigmatic. Martinho Dias asks us for the effort of reason to give in to the delight of the eye.
And it is not difficult. Through the tension that the faces convey, through the vigorous and markedly gestural smudge, through the light and the contrast of colours and through the irony, certainly, sometimes caricatural and satirical.
To remain indifferent to Martinho Dias' painting is to remain in disquiet and ambiguity. And we men, using the scalpel of explanatory reason, tend towards what is comfortable and right. The question is whether we get there.
António Tavares (Writer)
Written Painting by Robert Rich
245 x 95 cm
Acrylic on canvas
2004
Written painting by ROBERT RICH
This image acts as a metaphorical diagram of a flow of energy up the spine, originating in the perinium, and flowing upward to the top of the head where it expands outward. In my original vision, I saw an x-ray of a female torso from the rear. The buttocks are replaced by an old Edison lightbulb with clear glass and bright filament. The spinal chord is replaced by a double helix. The head and neck are replaced by a tornado expanding out to circling clouds. Other elements could substitute for the ones mentioned above, as long as the basic visual functions show an energetic interchange between the sky and human viscera.
Robert Rich
USA, October 2003