Ramalheira Vaz

Artist: Main Category: Painting
Biography: These are my most recent paintings. They depict rooms (museum rooms or gallery rooms), in the walls of which shaped canvas-like objects are shown — maybe some sort of modern, or post-modern, emblems. In fact, I really painted those “emblems” (as real shaped canvas against a wall) when I was a young student in a Portuguese school of fine arts, twenty years ago (back then, I took seriously the job of painting stripes and other “minimalist” gadgetery). Now, I can’t look at those early experiments without a disenchanted smile. The paintings shown are the result of that smile.

That’s why, I believe, they can be called “hogarthian” paintings. The “emblems” are depicted as that former student activity appears to me now: as a wreck — aging, spoilt, tired, corrupted, ruined and worn out. Converted in moral terms, that’s exactly the stigmata of the people Hogarth used to satirize. Like his paintings, mine could probably be called “comic history-painting” (the label is from Henry Fielding, the British writer and Hogarth’s friend who died in Lisbon in 1754).