Luís Vieira-Baptista

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Portuguese art is poorly known in France. But will there truly be nationalist arts? Not for sure. There are currents, expressions that are internationalized and mix with the cultures specific to each country. Vieira-Baptista illustrates this fusion well...
Le Figaro, Paris, 24/07/1986
“Colpa è di chi m’a destinato al foco”. In this final verse of one of Michelangelo's most beautiful sonnets, we are faced with, at the same time, the tragic awareness of a destiny that really has to be assumed like fire and the endorsement of the respective responsibility to an unknown force that cannot even be named. Although it is a love sonnet, it is certain that all true artists feel and act in a similar way, in relation to their expressive modalities; and in this “fire” to which such an ignorant force condemns them, naturally include the themes that impose themselves on them, the reasons that choose them, the challenges that excite and guide them. All fire, always. This is what happens, then, with Vieira-Baptista, who also has an intrinsic vocation of fire.
And here we have, at a distance of more than four centuries, updating in new and very personal chromatic games, in reworked textures, in reformulated plans and perspectives, the visual “message” of the Italian demiurge.

And here we have, at a distance of more than four centuries, updating in new and very personal chromatic games, in reworked textures, in reformulated plans and perspectives, the visual “message” of the Italian demiurge.
David Mourão-Ferreira, Abril de 1990
Vieira-Baptista shows himself every day to be the master of a more dazzling creative power, with less and less need to resort to superfluous devices to reveal to us the message he intends to convey. Take an image that is known to us and surround it or make it live, in a well-constructed ambience, with beautiful and appropriate tones, transparencies and opacities, providing the viewer with a spiritual delight in observing the global and an ever-renewed expectation in reading the particular.
Santiago Jervis Ponce, Outubro de 1996
Luís Vieira-Baptista is now more than a name, a renowned artist, a visionist, who paints dreams, truths and criticisms, a style and a work that involves us all, in a sensorial poetics that cannot be measured in texts or in retrospective exhibitions.

In Vieira-Baptista's canvases there are ghostly shadows of lyrical, theatrical, historical and dreamlike figures, impregnated with color, biblical or mythical characters, who dance, in silence, under a translucent veil of magic.
With a pluriform palette of stylistic resources, Vieira-Baptista creates works in stages, marked by countries and people that leave a mark of fidelity and authenticity.

Probably Luís Vieira-Baptista, who is already great, will be an even greater genius, in another time, the future, which already belongs to him. It has earned a place in the history of art that it is gradually consolidating, with rigor and detail.

Always ahead of his time, with an unusual touch of modernity, he promised and has delivered on a renewal of the visual arts when everything seems to have already been invented or recreated.
In an unusual way, with a very safe and characteristic line, between light and shadow, color and neutrality, calm, fatal or passionate faces emerge, with a serene, disenchanted or provocative look, like the women he portrays, always harmoniously tempting and irresistible, living sculptures with a soul.
In Vieira-Baptista, there are tensions and passions, lyricism and realism, spirit and matter, something new, anti-conformism, in permanent gestation and mutation. There is, almost always, a great, enormous, aesthetic sensitivity, which no faculty or school in the world can grant to anyone who does not already have it in their soul, or in another hidden place within themselves, somewhere between the heart and the soul.

Vieira-Baptista discovers, innovates, recreates, consecrates humble ingredients and transforms them, then returning them into immortal goods such as heaven, fire, water and earth.
A man who abandoned several things to be able to paint causes and, because of his talent and the courage he has in affirming it, in his own way, free from critical weights and intellectual prejudices, he risks remaining in history where so many just pass by, without leaving a trace or a trace.
Ana Paula Almeida, Jornalista da SIC, Televisão, 2005

Metaphysics in Art

Review by Nathalie Becker, Luxembourg 2007

Superiorly finished with exemplary patina and iconography with surprising depth, this is the painting by Luís Vieira-Baptista, an internationally renowned Portuguese artist whose creations can currently be seen at Galeria Rectoverso. 

The man is haughty, with a refined elegance, his way of being denotes a rich personal ease and a beautiful inner harmony. Life is a precious asset for him, a treasure that he venerates with each passing day and that he honors in his painting. He, the baby who suffocated at birth because of the umbilical cord and who survived the case, makes the most of the beauty of existence with avidity and recognition. 

Thus, his creations are invitations to an inner journey and lead the viewer to their own introspection. With a frontal and anti- conformist temperament, Luís Vieira-Baptista could not be content with being against the current and as a fiery plastic vocabulary was imposed on him, he therefore decided to create his own style at the end of the eighties, his personal movement which he named “Visionism”. 

Yes, Vieira-Baptista is very visionary and visionary. His inner world is fixed on the canvas by a confident line, a rich palette, a studied enlightenment and with dreamlike, ghostly and metaphysical visions.

Lift the veil

Ancient civilizations, forgotten rituals, legendary and biblical characters, mythological heroes, women in all their sensual splendor and charm, natural elements and life appear in his compositions theatricalized by “trompe-l’oeil” effects and telluric frames. 

 Water, the original broth where life germinates, is omnipresent, as are telluric and magmatic forces. The desert sand sends us back to some lonely and ascetic wildernesses while the bodies, often relegated to fragments as if they were mutilated ancient sculptures, evoke the strength of love and its pulsations. In addition, there is also an oval shape that becomes recurrent. 

Philosophy and religions also find a particular echo in his work, as in the series where the painter evokes the initiatory figure of Hermes Trismegistus, the one who must have lived three lives and who is at the origin of Hermeticism, a philosophical-religious doctrine where astrological and alchemical beliefs are anchored.  

First of all, the painter himself is a true alchemist as he metamorphoses simple figurative elements, sacralizing them and providing them with a great spiritual aura. His creations are not easily detached from the viewer. They invite our eyes to search, to lift the veil of the well-done work, to penetrate it in order to read it better and thereby enrich ourselves. 

Luís Vieira-Baptista

Alameda do Sabugueiro 7A, Murganhal, Caxias

vieirabaptista@gmail.com

+351 968 698 519

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