MAGNETIC ART
No need for a crush to start a painting. “I use buckets of paint. The paint is thrown onto the canvas and allowed to run naturally, horizontally, over rough surfaces. They can be stones, pieces of newspapers, or earth. I deform the edges and contours of the paints, I deform the shapes with the brush so that they adjust to what I intend — or I let myself be carried by the ‘server.’”
Luís Geraldes defines his artistic language as expressionist and abstract. In his abstraction through color appear lines and symbolism. “I also use Asian and Celtic elements — traditional touches of the East; that is, I place colors on a monochromatic background so that they function as therapies for the soul, at the level of the invisible. And when we observe the canvas, we are pulled, magnetically, into the work. We are drawn by the color, and for that reason, it has therapeutic characteristics.”
At first sight, one encounters the intention of Geraldes’s canvases. It is that intention — or the expressive tension of the canvases — up to the point where the artist lets himself be carried by the art of the commissioned painter. “My vision always reveals my convictions. They are the theses of the master that were passed on to me. The sensation is that of someone telling a story; they are simply pages of a notebook with various narratives. A way of placing in three dimensions our principles, beginning and end.”
All of Geraldes’s work gathers pieces of life, childhood, memories, and the past. From his experiences in Africa, he still mourns the brightness and warm colors that remained in his eyes and that appear in his canvases during the long years of exile — from when he moved to Angola, to the cold harsher climates of the State of Victoria in Australia. He is a pilgrim who crossed the world more than 25 years ago. “Leaving Portugal contributed to the enrichment of my work and my personality. Travel is essential for building every person’s knowledge.”
Light and shadow, calm and agitation, rigidity and fluidity, or ascendance and decline all merge in his work with a common element: the Cosmic Egg — spiritual and scientific, molecule, DNA element, and solar maps. A disorder that drags the same trace that a painting does: his loves marked by a near-absolute chaos.
The works of this artist who returns to his inner world are also revealed in collages full of three-dimensional effects. In this world he travels through other myths, crossing plastics and almost initiatory rituals that transmit and practice knowledge for diverse audiences. The artist seeks to give a kind of astrological and fragrant character to his experimental canvases. Mythological references. Numbers 1, 3, and 4. The two extremes and equilibrium. The cosmic number associated with the four elements, the five fingers of the hand, the five continents, the five bodies. The additional number is 7, and three is felt the strongest. Zero and infinity distinguish the creator. Geraldes’s art is not detached from this. “We are living atomic fusion, the virtual world, the frightening form of the Human Being who destroys so rapidly, spreading panic and confusion. There is a concluded search — the cosmos — and the crisis of the human being will be irreversible.”
And if the most radical fall of his paintings almost always ends in the same scenario, it is the light of Africa — where Geraldes was born — and the origins of his family. From Casa Branca to his Angolan uncles, the same affections that mark his days