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 PAINTINGS
2003-2015
The trilogy: music – text – painting, which is overlaid with the trilogy author – work – interpreter, is the foundation of the project Written Paintings. Several composers are invited to participate and they are asked to elaborate a plastic composition in the form of a descriptive text, instead of the musical notation.
The text, written by each composer, contains thus the work (written painting) which will be later interpreted and performed by me.
Plastic works are created as result of different languages or metalanguages from the interpretation of interpretations.
The analogies music/painting, text/painting, author/interpreter-author, as well as the writing of painting, are questions suggested by this project.
The “Written Paintings” are the result of a game of languages.
A plastic artist (me) invites a composer to create a painting. The composer, conceives, mentally and in a free way a visual composition, describing it by words in a form of a text that will reach the hands of the painter. This last, interpreting the descriptive text, that is, the written painting, will give form to the work imagined by the composer. We thus have a composer in the place of a painter, a text in the place of a score and a painter in the place of an instrumentalist / interpreter.
The texts elaborated by each composer contain hints and suggestions, more or less precise, such as conceptual aspects, characteristics of the visual forms and its place in the support, colours, expressiveness and reference to other elements that the composer wish to be represented in the work.
If some of the texts are precise in the writing of the painting, others work more in the suggestion level. Nevertheless, all of them carry music that will be reflected, consequently, in the painting, that is, all the Written Paintings reflect the musical universe of each composer-author; his experiences, concepts, sound material… his music.
After being created, and before being performed, music is written (exception being the improvised music). The painting, on the contrary, is performed in the same very moment in which it is conceived – it does not need a score nor an interpreter – the interpreter is the author himself. What I meant was to bring the musical process to Painting and play the role of the interpreter- performer of a work I haven’t created.
I therefore invited several composers to conceive and write a painting. The result is an undetermined set of Written Paintings.