MARTINHO DIAS, (b. 1968) is a visual artist from Portugal.

www.martinhodias.eu

His work moves itself, above all, in a social and political criticism inside a contemporary reality. He unfolds this reality, which is common to us, in a suggestive, implied way. He privileges patterns of information collecting photographs from the mass media, such as newspapers, magazines or images taken from the television. In an intelligent way, he uses these “models” of his for the accomplishment of pictorial compositions, which are the substratum of the representations of figures and bodies of his painting, faced as an inevitability of the daily life.

“His vision regards the conscience as the element that identifies the human identity. Martinho Dias equates the deconstruction of the several fringes of the reality as we perceive it, in what Debord calls “the integrated spectacular”, and reconfigures them in the plan of the canvas, showing in several levels and in various forms (in the realism of the figures, in the sketch or in the partial erasure) that the apprehension of the outside world will not be possible for us, unless the painting itself is so complex and multiform as the global world.” (Hugo Barata)

The excellent technical control of the work of Martinho Dias skims the irony, the cynicism or the paradox and it transports us beyond the painting itself, to legitimate and different experienced realities, as well as to a world in transit, even if involuntarily.

Gianni Zanieri, 2008