In this painting we see four parallel, stylized planes succeeding each other. They are all flat – like the even colour of the red, synthetically drawn rooftops; like the smooth and uniform brush-strokes of the façades and the mountains; like the neutral colour of the background and the large foreground where six figures are placed in the middle of nowhere. They form an ellipse as in La Danse (1910) by Henri Matisse, but without the colour, without the movement; only clothes stripped of bodies, shrouds which do not dance, but just remain.

Houses with figures from a dream is without doubt one of the most unreal and metaphysical works of Portuguese painting. It is an ingenuous and estranged composition, an unreal, saturnine and unsettling landscape that brings forth an irresistible need for questioning. Its geometry and use of colours are limited to the essential: red triangles, white squares, black rectangles, among which the figures – stylized, ashamed, ghostly effigies – are arranged. The three top hats plus the three brimmed hats are like six linguistic signs, three exclamations and three questions that form an ellipse of stillness and unreality, a litany of prayers for the dead. They are disjointed figures in a landscape without time, scarecrows without clock, without birds, without work – only with a withered tree. Are they going to hang themselves? Are they playing a game? Or is it, as ub Cesário Verde’s poem Ave Marias, an evening of ‘such gloom, such melancholy’, that it calls forth an ‘absurd desire to suffer’?

 

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