Museum of Vila Velha - Vila Real - Portugal

A Retrospective - Vila Velha Museum - Vila Real - Portugal

LUÍS SOARES, IN THOUGHT

When we are confronted with Luís Soares' painting, we feel certain vibrations and different thoughts come to our minds in order to capture the message that, with his creations, the Lusitanian painter, born in Mozambique in 1952, intends to transmit to us. At a time when Europe and the world were changing its plastic interpretation, this gave its fruits, transmitting messages of future and strength to the artistic life in general.
We must not forget that the great masters of impressionism discovered one day that, besides the air that filled the studio, there was the light and the direct force of the living Nature and they went out in search of lights, counter-lights and frontal sensations, in order to be able to mould something more real and break, therefore, with other forms of expression that, until then, had marked man's way in his artistic creation. Luís Soares, besides poetry and even musical notes and voices modulating strange phrases, but full of warmth and humanism, brings us, no doubt, something new. His deformations, between cubism-expressionism, accentuate, through an excellent drawing and the mixture of colours, elements in which the strength and the power of man are committed, as part of creation, to make life flow more placidly.
At times his figures may seem dramatic but, nevertheless, when we analyse the vigour with which he attacks the human part of his deformist or intimate whims, we feel that they project a vision that marks the legitimacy he has achieved in ceramics, in sculpture and in painting itself, which is where he recreates a time that allows him to dialogue with the present and always project himself towards a future full of sensations and, above all, of realities that are well known to people who, like him, have a singular notion of the Universe and of the essence of supernatural power.
Contemplating Luís Soares' work, I cannot help imagining his aesthetics embodied in big mural surfaces, flooding with their joyful and festive chromaticism the streets, avenues and squares of the city... or solving stained-glass windows which, by filtering the light, create pleasant and suggestive interior spaces.
The artist presents, besides a significant and uncomplicated work through the plastic languages he employs, concrete proposals and reasoned dialogues that allow us, with the simple contemplation of his work, to clearly approach the concept of Art.

FRANCISCO MONTOYA GARCÍA
From the Spanish Association of Art Critics

Exhibition Catalogue