Do Subnaturalismo ao Sobrenaturalismo (Pintura Fria) is not so much a representation of a landscape as an image which has distanced itself from a reality which, initially, was its referent. What this painting is concerned with is thus not an attempt to establish a relationship of similarity between a landscape and a representation of a landscape, but rather a questioning of the notion and the nature of the ‘image’ – a reflection which runs throughout Luís Noronha da Costa’s work. In fact, the canvas here is treated as a ‘screen’, a plane depicting an image which we are able to recognise, but which actually belongs to another ontological scheme.

In a process similar to abstraction, this painting-image distances itself from one reality in order to, in a different way, proclaim its status as an alternative reality – establishing itself as an autonomous entity which is created in a dimension exclusive to the pictorial realm in which it operates.

MBA

November 2011