Somnium I, Series VII

Somnium is Latin for a dream, and the painting behaves like one. A head and shoulders are clearly present, built with enough structure to read as a specific person, and at the same time the whole image is coming apart into slashes of red, teal, ochre, black and white that run, pool and scatter across the canvas. Nothing has been tidied: the drips are where gravity put them.

Mario Henrique paints fast and physically, often with hardware tools rather than brushes, and he throws paint as much as he applies it. The initial gesture is deliberate; where the paint lands is not. That division is the subject. A portrait is an attempt to fix a person in place, and this method guarantees the attempt only partly succeeds, which is a fair description of how a face behaves in memory, present for a moment on waking, then overwhelmed by everything around it.

Part of Series VII, Somnium I is a unique oil and acrylic on canvas measuring 120 × 110 cm. It cannot be repeated, including by the artist. Henrique is based in Cascais, and a studio visit can be arranged through the gallery.

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