Rafael Morales Cultural Centre - Talavera de la Reina - Spain

Rafael Morales Cultural Centre - Talavera de La Reina - Spain

THE ADVENTURE OF MAKING THE DREAM COME TRUE

Luis Soares is a sane madman. Or a sane madman. Species of rare etiology, very difficult to define, to which I myself have the honour to belong. To be a sane madman or a healthy madman is to live from art, an insubstantial species, which feeds the soul and does not cover the kidney. And sane or sane crazy is to present an artist who presents himself. Neither Luis Soares nor his art need presenters or presentations.

Their best calling card is themselves, the artist and his art. Quixote and Sancho at the same time, he goes through life sometimes dressed in lights and sometimes dressed in shadows.

After all, in this cruel world everything is a matter of masks, that each one wears the one that suits him, which is the most convenient. As the Bulgarian writer Doncho Tzonchef announced in Nothing Happened: "A depraved man knows how to wear the mask of a saint better than anyone else."

From a white father walking around the missions, the face (or mask) of Luis Soares has been changing over the years, man of the world and donkey with a bad seat. Who quietly boasts of living in three continents at the same time that are a single continent, the one that in his image and likeness he delimited with a chalk circle to take with him wherever he goes.

Currently on horseback, between Cascais and Talavera de la Reina (and the Tagus, in the Republic), Luís Soares wanders through the garden of forking paths, feeling the emptiness with his hands like the pianist that wanders through the city of his last concert in search of the grand piano that he doesn't know in which theatre it was left forgotten hanging on the final note. Allegro ma non troppo.

Border with Madagascar

Set to be born, that somewhere you have to come into the world to start being someone, the unborn child (with intrauterine memory, like Dalí) decided that it would be very convenient for his future biography as an artist of universal projection to appear face to face with the world. Where the morning begins. And it is the Ortho.

How long would I have to live as a brush artist at the diametrically opposite point. where the earth ends And is sunset. So that from sunrise to sunset and from sea to sea runs its tide table. From the Indian Ocean to the Atlantic, with two continents for solid seat, Africa and Europe. And a third one, Asia, as a discordant exotic mirror in which he looks for inspiration. Strange as it may be, Luís Soares plunged into this crazy world through the gap of a place politically called "overseas province with autonomy" (euphemism for overseas colony), bordering that whale-shaped island that is Madagascar. Glimpsing looking at the largest island on the African continent is In good health.

His mother exclaimed: "Jesus!" And Luís was born, with his name already defined. It was 22 August 1952, in Lourenço Marques (today Maputo), capital of Mozambique. A descendant of colonists, he calls himself. Because that is the motto he carries proudly on his back, engraved with blood and fire, like a slave of life to whom life makes happy. He will have to speak at length about this occasion in a future biography of many pages and profusion of illustrations about his life and work, which augurs well for pleasant and surprising passages.

It is worth saying in advance: Luis Soares is not a resident of anywhere, a dull address with a name of convenience. To the amazement of the naïve, he lives inclined to vertigo on the Boca do Inferno. Hanging in a dream, like Mary Poppins of the umbrella, the neighbour of Boca do Inferno takes such a tremendous name for chirigota. What he likes (shell) are not the demons extremely bad, with goat legs, horns with twists and a ringed tail, but the demons are absolutely good, angelic even. The demons, decidedly anthropomorphic, who kiss and embrace with human repulsion. And humans who kiss and embrace with diabolical passion. Luís Soares is a demiurge, a force unleashed by nature.

Few people I know exude as much apparent vitality as he does, despite the procession inside. Because in life, as in the repeated cycle of the seasons, there are springs, summers, autumns and winters.

(….)

With a diabolically thin line (in drawing and engraving) that comes and goes like straw smoke (black from pen or buril) and gets lost in the infinite arabesque of a kaleidoscopic stroke. Or with dense brushstrokes (with Picassian resonances) forming two faces in a single circle, where the facial features are shared, as snow lends itself to avalanches.

Or in bronze jewellery or sculptures that twist like iron in sweet fire, because everything is animated by the passion of ceaseless creation, creative freedom.

In Talavera de la Reina, a Toledo address, which he shares with Cascais, a Portuguese address overlooking the Hellmouth, Luís Soares lives, works, creates, imagines and dreams his way, agreeing with Jofre (to those who have not read him) that "life is perfect when you have the opportunity to make a dream come true".

Antonio Martínez Cerezo

(Writer, Historian and Academician)

-Exhibition Catalogue