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Luís Soares is a thirty-eight-year-old Mozambican, red-haired like Van Gogh, lucid like Seneca, prolific like Picasso and resourceful like Leonardo who, transplanted to Cascais, dreams of his south-eastern African homeland and of the Babylonian cities of art, to which he travels from time to time. But, for the moment, it is not his biography that interests us, but what he does, what is here, in plain sight. When we get to know him, his artistic versatility ceases to amaze us. In terms of plastic arts there is nothing he doesn't know how to do, although this opinion makes us think of a craft work, for which he has the ability but transcending it, as the good artist that he is. Of the three structural functions of art, to make - to express - to symbolize, Soares carries out the first one admirably. After all, he lives in a time where the "gesturalism", the concretism and the "happening" have made understand that the truth that enlightens the art is the fact of making it. That is why he gives himself to his drawings, paintings, sculptures and ceramics, as if they were all the same thing - as they really are - but with a knowledge of the univocal and singular of each language. Just as he traces lines, so energetic that they become incisions or reliefs, and as smooth as a musical and rhythmic theory, making the arm, the hand, slide swiftly, with skilful gestures, without making his art an "action painting". Luís Soares dips his brushes in what the scholastics called "abundantia cordis" and in a very lively sensitiveness. The surfaces marked by lines symbolise, due to his great tendency for rounded shapes, a predominantly feminine universe: in ceramics, due to his volumes of spherical or cylindrical geratrix; in flat structures, because of his schematised figures: circumferences and secant and eccentric circles, faces with big eyes.
Luís Soares' work often shows a certain primitivism that, personally, I am far from recognising; what he shows is not a wild spontaneity but a fluid expression of his vital extrovert attitude, which has not prevented the sedimentation of cultural reflections of different natures.
Facing the "simulacrum" of reality or abstraction, Soares, without abstruse investigations, without pretences or rhetoric, without anguish or suffering, incorporates himself in the impetuous discourse of the present art, transforming into signs what we could call "plastic thoughts", thus composing his works with that automatic lyricism that characterises him.
There is, in all Soares' manifestations, a Venus cult, a human and oceanic dimension inhabited by feminine creatures, a world of enamoured figures, a dawn of maternities and nymphs; an enclosure without atmosphere, an underwater space. It is not by chance that his most frequent emblematic symbol is the spiked fish, of an archaic species that only exists in Soares' nostalgic aquarium. The quick execution of his works leads him to use all kind of materials. He chooses, preferably, techniques whose execution is quick - oils, watercolours, tempera - with supports that dispense any preparation: handmade papers, for instance, although he does not disdain any other experience. This behaviour is also found in sculpture, where the more abundant presence of matter makes the spiritualisation of language even more difficult. Here he behaves in a more primitive and paradoxical way. He models with abrasives or sharp instruments - and his characteristic quickness - a block of rigid polyurethane foam which is then moulded in bronze. The result is a strange mixture of the rough and the refined in an anthropomorphic and totemic figure.
In ceramics, where he also makes plates or containers, as well as painting panels on tiles, his work has not been only formal or superficial; he has investigated components, formulas and techniques until obtaining some characteristic products whose only fault could be the risk of his own mannerism.
What he expresses with this or that language, with one technique or another, is the dialogue with the elemental forces, which does not mean that it is primary and much less naive. I believe that this is the meaning of what he does. The spectator will know why he does it when contemplating his work, since the work of art, as Milton C. Nham demands, is an event that unites the artist and the observer in a single creative act.
EDUARDO MARCO SAMPER
(International Association of Art Critics)
