About Ressonância

We can consider that in this work the artist presents his studio as a stage, where we not only see him acting, but also perceive that it is through this space that the painter positions himself to look at the world or reflect on it. We are immediately summoned to the discomfort/curiosity of a voyeur, who, without being seen or perceived, unveils the intimacy: of a context (the emergence of the work of art); of a practice (the practice of painting); and of a personality (that of the artist).

In this way, these works by Leonel Cunha also establish a tension between truth and fiction, which is problematized both in the construction of painting and in the act of painting itself. When it seems that the artist's intention is to unveil the intimacy of his studio, explaining that there is nothing in painting beyond the simple exercise of painting, we are faced with each look with a new reading of meaning, which multiplies through the possibility of conjugation of elements arranged in space.

When it is suggested that we are facing an occasional mess in a workplace, we realize in the composition of the images and the repetition of elements that it is, after all, a scenic space, where all the mess is just a premeditated formal, conceptual and compositional.

Nuno Malheiro Sarmento