In its newest series, Mare Nostrum - composed by thirty-four canvases - fish's presence is, in principle, multiplier. As if it were protofish or ancestral fish presence that gave origin to all the other species or participating in the actuality of those, diverse, through which, one day, he came to light. Therefore, Fish, due to the vivifier light that caress him - in the colors of its multiples shoals, as well as in its multiple scales - reminds us as much the history of Christianity and its founder - which ordered that his apostles (among them were fishermen) became men's fishermen - as man's trajectory in Mare Nostrum on behalf of conquest and people's discovery.

In the canvases of Plínio Palhano fish passivity, inseparable from sea movement, cover itself with various forms, all of them under the command of our passions or the passion that the painter himself inspired. So, in its dance's symmetry and in its eyes whose shine is agonizing, as well as in the quality of still life in a dish - art, donation and food -, where the fishes acquire first a bloody (red) coloration, and then white in a black back - a veiled advertisement to life destruction in seas -, we have a work in continuous movement, that does not stop neither before the benevolence of solitary fish, sacrificing itself to world, among greens, to be served to men, nor before the reiterated remembrance of the same marine back, its colors varying between black, violet and red, in all its symbolic gradation.

Other forms and species, such as mollusks, shellfishes and starfishes blend and join together in Mare Nostrum's fauna. However, fishes' eyes and its yellow globe, its dark or blue pupils and its sighing or resigned mouths, inviting us to a reflection about ourselves more than to a reflection about themselves, is dominant.

The various combinations among the forms emphasize the several means of Mare Nostrum: however, what they transmit us as a permanent legacy, mainly, is its silent language, of what was not written, of what will be, eternally, a visionary salvation, as well in aquatic and mobile space as our common history's time.

The sea - shell or aquarium of everything - is the great receptacle, in its extreme chromatic variation, in tireless dance of forms that bathe in him, searching its center inside them but having in fish - in its iridescent sense of multiplication - its real center.

What does Plínio Palhano intend with Mare Nostrum, this transfigured and transformer work? Precisely transform us, make us see beyond ourselves, and learn, together with Santo Antonio de Lisboa, to hear fishes: because, certainly, they will hear us more than the so-called present men. From this modernity, always repeated, in several epochs and situations, in men's history.

If men are earth salt, as said Jesus - the fish for excellence - not everyone, however, accomplished the mission. Santo Antonio's sermon, preached by the priest Antonio Vieira in Sao Luis, Maranhão, in the distant year of 1554, continues to be current, but it's enough these words of sermon: "You will know, my brothers fish, that the salt, as you sea's sun, has two proprieties, that in you yourselves one sees: conserve the healthy and preserve him in order that he does not be corrupted".

These words of the priest Vieira, together with esthetic example of Plínio Palhano, are, at one time, witness and advertisement about the salt that conserves life and art's life, life that will only exist if it will have transfiguration and, then, if the conversion of real in one light bigger than he himself comes about.

Angelo Monteiro is Poet and Essayist

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