On the canvases hung at the Espaço Vivo, Plínio Palhano defines, starting from the title of the exhibition, his behavior as an artist worried about the precise and implacable search for quality and revelation in a way the seeming reality disowns, almost and existential dimension which, because of its lucid permanence in memory, shows the aesthetic and, chiefly, poetic, itinerary to be followed like certain paths which suddenly are realized at dawn and seem to take to the smoky construction of the clouds, but, inexorably, lead us to our most secret identity.

The nudes by Plínio Palhano - created with evident fervor, an impassioned religiosity similar to the one of the Sienese painters of the XIV century and, at the same time, to both the critical and sensual irony of the Expressionists included in the impeccable discipline of the bold drawing balancing the volumes, like Mantegna, in the difficult and irreverent perspectives, as well as in the faultless dosage of light and shadow which gives the color that density, a kind of assessment that identifies the mysterious and subtle aura which covers the female nude, along the history of painting after the "Tenebrists", and determines the space where the object does not belong to the onlooker, but turns into the clear-cut and powerful contours of vision.

There is no question that the rediscovery of the mystery (its silent corridors, whispers in its rooms, windows slightly open over the awakening) revealed by Nudes of August, for Plínio Palhano´s pictorial technique, as refined as the one of the "manieristi", is the stay of the transfiguring imagery of his work which represents the female body nakedness re-established in its bright dignity and in its integrity composed of endless regions unachievable by the empirical analysis and by the Cartesian inquiry.

At a time like this where the female body has lost its quality of sacred and has been set down, with mockery, in the violent light of vulgarity - with the same subtlety the most important anatomical parts of cattle for slaughter are displayed -, Plínio Palhano sets up what Fernando Monteiro calls "the theme of the body pictorially meditated in a obsessive investigation of the relationship painter/model". This meditation, this investigation, this relationship are mediums for the survival of the human adventure beyond the everyday life limitations imposed and organized by the absurd, used with impassioned mettle, turning to a relentless plastic narrative.

The contemplation of Nudes of August is an exercise which extols and levels the individual rescued as a being of flesh and dream, longing for the absolute, restless creature subjected to the punishment of temporality.

I am not referring to the bourgeois exaltation or humbleness, but to those feelings which, together with time, to use the Ungarettean expression, in front of the work of art, succeed in reducing the vital act to its essence: "being is dreaming."

This 1993, both century and winter coming to a close, the feminine bodies (the tragic and immaculate nakedness Plínio Palhano displays at the Espaço Vivo) state the lyric and desperate need of permanence, beyond the most charming transitoriness which evoke Christopher Marlowe´s verses dedicated to the rebel and penitent Dr. Faustus: "Lente, lente currite noctis equi."

Franco M. Jasiello, crítico de arte

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