Ângelo Monteiro
The Fire Code
Plínio Palhano´s art is bewildering and baffling.
He is one of these artists who, in spite of their high level of information, they will never perform a derivative art. Thus, his painting forms a whole instauration starting from his own view of Reality, and, in this respect, it is predominantly visionary. The shapes seem to be submitted by his genius to a process of ongoing recreation, never allowing itself to fit in with any fixed or finished model. It is a deluge of colors or a code of fire, of an immemorial fire that seems to reactivate lost and forgot messages and, at the same time, suggests the birth of something completely new and overwhelming to our conscience or our watchful unconscious.
Expressionism and Impressionism fuse into the same painter. We can never say whether it is the abstraction or the dream the most important aspect. But in his painting one realizes a strained and wakeful vision on the things which, in their continuous change, renovate themselves perpetually in front of our eyes. Richness and vitality overflow lavishly, from every of his brushstrokes, stunning us and disquieting us with the powerful lavas of an inner volcano. Painter above all, magician and visionary, Plínio, nevertheless, preserves the presence of certain constants or archetypes like flames or mandalas, floral or stellar games, human shapes and strange animal shapes crossing each other as if they were on a carpet heavy with a living and hallucinatory fire that does not stop, but seems to spread beyond the limits of his canvases.
The tropical nature is also to be found in certain living suggestions which demarcate distance from the photographical realism so common to a determinate part of our painting. This happens because Plínio Palhano is more worried about the shape or the being of the things than the immediate matter through which things manifest themselves to us. By creating an art full of sensibility, Plínio, nonetheless, does not confine it to the webs of the sensible, reason why his Painting opens itself to a correspondence with other arts like Music and Poetry, inner messages where it finds its way of being. Dominating the skill of painting like few, one never feels him as if he were a technician who makes a pretext of his themes to fulfill a cold and neuter craft. For in him the luminous surpasses the merely technical, because Plínio Palhano feeds on light, color, sun and life and on light, color, sun and life he feeds his painting. Atemporal, non-spatial, the great painting by Plínio Palhano is opposite to the hardworking exercise of those who just view art from a strictly rational perspective. For this very reason, each of his paintings conveys amazement and uneasiness, stuff the great art needs to exist and allow man survive through it.
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