Luís Soares is a born researcher and creator. Painter, sculptor, engraver, poster artist, graphic designer, glazier and potter, his work is characterised by a strong expressionist symbolic accent.
Born in Mozambique, of Portuguese descent, currently residing in the Portuguese country, his great artistic production and his desire for knowledge have projected his creation internationally, consolidating himself today as a great artist of recognised prestige and works in important museums in various countries.
In this anthology he presents works from different phases, in which his eagerness to discover and experiment, always with a constant, his accentuated primitivist accent, his attribution to symbolic representation of an organic type but also with a profound mythologising and divinising accent.
In the 1967-1974 period, he used different techniques and procedures on paper in his pictorial creation: China ink, pastels and, later, mixed media. Expressionist figuration appeared in the 1975-80 period, to be followed by real journeys of the soul, the product of reveries, dreams and meditation (1981-83). The symbolist phase corresponds to the years 1984 and 85, although this approach to his work did not abandon him afterwards, although it seemed more sieved. Schematism appears in 1986 and 1987, then passes through a year of great experimentation in 1988, becoming interested in informalism in 1989 and in organic creation in 1990. Parallel to his pictorial production, he works in sculpture, markedly expressionist, of a sensual nature. while his ceramics are more descriptive, from 1980 to the present day, and his creation in tiles follows the same line, much more condescending in the formal aspect of the term. From the 1990s to the present day, the Portuguese artist is interested in deepening his more pronounced primitivist concept, transforming it into a pictorial language with a marked personal mark, in which his symbolist vision stands out, his almost naïve recreation of characters, his world of existing beings, seated women, compositions and faces of Picassoan influences, traces of a certain naivety that accompany him continually, presenting us with a universal world of beings endowed with a soul, from the galaxies that collide with each other, to the fish of colours, exotic birds, faces with big eyes that look at the world presented to them with the force of verisimilitude.
From the real, visceral. From the vivid, clashing, chromatically incandescent palette, he moves on to sensual colour, endowed with sensitivity, strength of character, nourished by the vivacity of all essences.
Evolui da verosimilhança para a verdadeira idiossincrasia. Da realidade de um pintor absorto no mundo, marcado pelo orgânico, passa a uma abordagem em que se insere no caminho dos deuses, daqueles seres que governam o destino de uma humanidade marcada pela ignorância com sua omnipresença . Das cores da inocência ao cromatismo do sexo e à estruturação da aura de todos os seres criados.
Luís Soares, Portuguese painter, of African soul and universal destiny.
Mario Ángel Marrodán com arranjos de Mateo Berrueta e Joan Lluís Montané
AICA – Associação Internacional de Críticos de Arte
