Miguel BRANCO (1963)

Miguel Branco studied Painting at ESBAL. His first exhibition, quite atypical in the light of his later shows, took place in 1988, and was called Objectos Discretos (Discreet Objects). The exhibit comprised small, ironic, odd human figures, moulded in monochromatic terracotta, which were placed individually in illuminated iron showcases. These sculptures, caught in fleeting and apparently futile attitudes (like smoking, bursting bubbles, yawning or scratching their genitals, etc.), gaining an absurd stature of public relevance by means of the direct light.

His subsequent exhibitions were of a different nature, and consolidated his style. The largest part of Miguel Branco’s production, between the end of the 1980s and mid 1990s, encompasses works in oil on wood or paintings on small canvases (between 20 and 40 centimetres). These renderings are arranged in series or according to themes which either represent animals (normally one animal) or objects (skulls, bowls).

Although the figures that comprise his treaty on beasts– ostriches, chickens, dogs, monkeys– proceed from direct observation and photographs, the gaze that selects the images is already pictorial. The pose of choice is unaffected by the painter’s hand; yet this realness is staged, carefully selected, being neither completely natural nor completely artificial.

Even though the execution of these odd animal themes uses a number of features that are commonly associated with genre painting– a traditional painting form, wherein extreme attention is given to the fall and play of light– they are neither determined by, nor subordinated to past meanings. In fact, nothing could be farther from the picturesque– for two essential reasons: the importance of the theme is clearly secondary– repetition through presentation in series leads to erosion; furthermore, any attempt to figuratively interpret these images according to the normal canons of representation is destined to failure. This impossibility is enforced by an adroit game of arrangement, where certain elements reciprocally disavow each other: the de-contextualisation of place; the uncertain provenance and bizarre nature of the shadows cast by the figures and some brushstrokes of colour that seem to sprinkle the surface with hues, much like the material that composes the figures’ body. The spaces proposed by these paintings thus suggest ambiguous (interior or exterior) scenarios, bathed in an operatic light. Their individuality is expressed through a process of semantic and narrative exhaustion. 

After an interregnum of several years, Miguel Branco has apparently learnt how to reinvent his universe of references. Branco reappeared at the end of the 1990s with a new set of works. These shrinking canvases conceal isolated, masked or faceless, anthropomorphic figures– manifesting a central issue that was merely latent in his work with a new and greater vitality: that theme being animality, or monstrosity, dramatised in an environment of disquieting strangeness.

NUNO FARIA