São Francisco Building Dacosta Gallery
Who, looking at the sky, has not seen winged horses, sleeping dragons and terrifying monsters? Who, looking at the ground, has not seen faces on rocks and silhouettes in puddles?
This psychological phenomenon is called pareidolia. It makes us attribute meaning to vague and random stimulus, allowing us to find the familiar in what to others is nothing more than a set of indistinct features.
These small portraits by Francisco Nisa are the result of that sensitivity to the signs that subliminally surround us. Adding also the capacity to endow those faces read in the stones with character, style and emotion, offering them a social dimension.
In this process, photography is not an end in itself, but a foundation. It captures and records allowing the final painting to appear. This is no longer a copy of the photographic image, but the humanised representation of the initial images, using the traditional portrait genre.
The paint, in rough layers, as used by Rembrandt or Velasquez, gives these paintings a sculptural and dramatic character. The small scale, along the lines of the painter Miguel Branco, gives it a discreet character that invites closeness.