About Luís Soares, what comes to our mind first of all is the versatility with which he approaches several forms of plastic expression, keeping however something identifiable as common to all of them, but managing, at the same time, to penetrate the proper sense of each one of them, the formal elements and even the chromatic values move from drawing to painting and from this to ceramics and sculpture, always gaining the specific meaning that derives from the technique and the materials used, only together do they achieve what we may call a combined effect, as if each artistic discipline were an extension of the other, in a chain of links in which the truly important thing is the overall result. Let us expose: a painting, a sculpture and a piece of ceramics by Luís Soares, let us analyse them together. There you have it! That continuity we are talking about.

Luís Soares was born in Mozambique, and the roots of his work are to be found in that country of the east coast of Africa. The shrill purity of colour, the whimsicality of line, the stylised lengthening of shapes, the expression of masks and faces, has much of the primitive wisdom of the African art. But in 1978 he returned to Portugal, the land of his parents, where the need for new roots led him to approach western art; of the stains and textures, of the prevalence of the work's own dynamics and the interest in improvisation that led him to explore the line, as Klee and Miró had done, with narrative intent, when it is an outline, but also as a definer of rhythms and organiser of spaces. Black and of diverse thickness, it is the true dominant of his art.

A line that is always the path of the hand, sometimes drawing anthropomorphic forms, other times cursive, sliding at random, getting lost in the arabesque or finding itself in the sign, magical and inventive.

In the sculpture, the same slender and carcassed bodies, of a dramatic expressiveness, by what it presupposes of passivity. A passivity similar to the one that enters our homes on video - images of the starving continent and its people, condemned to die in a skeletal wandering along trails of barren dryness.

On the ceramics, the warm, intense colours, dripping onto the smooth surface of the stoneware, tears gliding: blues, greens, pinks mixing in an amalgam of tones cooked by fire.

They are different but they complete each other. Luís Soares, white outside, black inside, artificer of fire and artist of the line. A multifaceted personality, sometimes disconcerting; hands navigating, between the drift and the steady course, through the space of the support.