RITUALS

Sorne years ago, António Mira began a route of traveI: the heaths of the Alto Alentejo or the coasts of Zambujeira, Brittany, the tour of the Azorean islands, a premeditated nomadism of one who seeking primordial Ioci, holy territories of life or death chosen by the earliest ot rnen. With further premeditation, he photographed, in Alentejo and in Brittany, dozens of dolmens, rnenhirs and aiignments, suited with coloured circies or ribbons, a mist of pigments like fleeting auras soon corrupted by the wind and the night.

This intirnate register — secret indicator of an attitude of living — suggests a puriring immersion, and the restless obsession of acceding to wisdom, but it is also the significant core of series of works he now presents.
The process is complex, at once artisanal and sophisticatedly technical, as he always loved. Part of painting — at times from previous compositions which seerned to be selt-sufficient — practised as loose gestual acts or submitted to the rationaiizes invention of light through large plans of colour, but this painting is permanently confronted with selected photography which wiil be immersed in it, Iike a skin or soul that the final silk-screen will shape. Then, the initial figures becorne plastic signs, remaining nevertheless symbols, introducing their dense concentration in the painting’s abstract space, an objectifíed procedure with a clear conceptualistic matrix.

The sacred particularity of the elected objects, the ritualised muteness of their discovery and photographic mise en scène, converts these paintings into tense places of search: the quest for primordial circle and for the withstanding strategies of religious existence. In fact, the only discourse the painter consents to interweave in these works — ARS VITA MORS — speaks of that primordial source of ali religions, the act of religare life and death through the insecure gestures of art.
By also rebinding materiais and techniques, and the hand with the autonomy of photography and silk-screening, António Mira apparently wants to involve the artistic making in a obsessive desire for consecration and significant reforming. Something like an oeuvre-au-noir, dyed by the rnost contemporary fictions.

Raquel Henriques da Silva
(As a Director of the Portuguese Institute of Museums)