Technique

Light time paintings

Abel Grade from Portugal has earned the brass painting prize in the 38th Salon Concours International in Gembloux — Bélgic, convened and organized by the Academie Europeenne des Arts. The winning painting, “Sonho de Verão”, is a neofigurative acrylic on canvas painting, measuring 70 by 50 cm.

This is the first reflection one experiences upon contemplation of Abel Grade work. His work born both from an observation and introspection experience, and it is a very special pleasure because we see in these paintings often born from the night obscurity through which human thoughts flow, the light of the vital balance reached via spiritual serenity.

We believe that both who have followed Abel’s work for some time and those who discover it today, will agree in a first starting point: the light; the images he creates are more than a place but a revival. These images are coming from a combination of intimate transformations in the subconscious which he has dared to visit, and so they emerge with internal harmony and a decided will of understanding within the environment. There is in every single work and in the whole exhibition the will of sharing, the connection with places, cities, jazz musicians, after all the safety of a journey.

Abel Grade creative language, in the period we can study and enjoy today has developed in an extraordinary manner. This is a wealth Abel shares with us, the audience of his work, as the result of the communication action of his creative thought. He lets us interpret his work and while he explains it with sincerity, he gives us strength so that each one of us can discover himself in his paintings. The city is restless as it is the human existence, however, if we learn and understand its change, we will certainly reach the harbour of duty duly accomplished.

When people sees this paintings for the first time they have a sensation of confronting an alien representation, that they cannot explain, the way are accustomed to ,the way are accustomed to with the pencil or a pen. In fact this is a medium that has very little tradition. It has existed for only about a hundred years.

Nowadays this technique it finally achieved equality with other techniques and became part of some movements and decisive vanguards in the history of art.

After World War I, movements such as Bauhaus, in Germany, began to strengthen the nature of this technique by legitimizing the mechanism and appreciating this medium.

The foundations of this way of expression are rooted in prehistory; in cave painting such as those in Lascaux , France,or the caves of the Pinturas River in Argentina, we find pigments sprayed around a hand so that is blocked off and the area outside its silhouette is colored.

It’s very important to understand the role that this new technique as a new tool has had in art. Its acceptance depended entirely on the position that artistic movements would adopt in regard to technology and modernity. Some vanguard movements fled from mechanization, cities, and technology, but others relied heavily on this new social reality that was tied to industry.

When Bauhaus and Art Deco appeared, they defended the synthesis of art and technology.
People such as Paul Klee and Vasily Kandinsky analyzed art from the view point of several disciplines, and established their own principles and rules.

They design and they produced real art.

This technique combine with the other techniques in all these woks in order to create new ways to look.

Following along with the tendencies of the sixties, we arrive at the superrealist style.
Whereas pop art was found in all kinds of techniques and aspects of culture, superrealism was produced only in a world of drawing and painting.

The ability to idealize images and create fantasy with airbrush is a legacy from the surrealist movement; it’s characterized by freedom and dreams.

Abel Grade like Luis Noronha da Costa,(one of the most inventive and truly original painters in Portugal), he has been reflecting on the nature of space, both as the medium in which things are perceived and as the continuum in which events happen or are envisioned as happening using this fine technique.

An effort to paint in a particular mood. The evocation by the overall character of the light and subject matter.