Ângelo Monteiro
COMPOSITIONS OF NUDITY
By taking the nakedness as a pictorial pretext, Plínio Palhano makes it, at the same time, into a reflection of reality and a starting point for his expressionism, merging a need of formal expansion - starting from the sensible world - with an abstract refusal to linger on the experience offered by these shapes themselves.
His studies have double direction: now they stress determinate volumes - thighs, breasts, buttocks - enriching its erotical component, now they dematerialize to just seek a play on lines and shapes in which the ochres and blues, and scarcely the red, will come to add to point out the charge of abstraction.
The nudes' face is always hidden, and this cover-up now aims at the emphasis of the parts or volumes, now the possibility of creating new shapes starting from the known forms, in a paradoxical eroticism which is first and foremost escape than fusion with things that offer themselves to the greed of the artist's eyes, hands and brushes.
For one thing, such a nakedness bears no resemblance to the nudes which gave it birth, then taking place the valorization of separate aspects of each shape or volume in itself, regardless of the whole, as if each aspect were worth for itself.
For another, we delve - together with the painter - into the bafflement of a world in which both the sensation and the escape from the sensation have similar heft, as if the possession or the refusal of things were two indifferent moments of an existential process changed into an aesthetic process.
Thus, in Plínio Palhano we have a seismograph of the contemporaneousness: the absence of the face of these nudes is a symptom of the breach of identity in the simultaneous encounter and loss of the visible shapes which gave themselves up to the artist's senses as if in an endless search.
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