Like many of the works executed by Adriano Sousa Lopes throughout his life, Night at the Channel renders the spontaneous making of painting produced directly “from nature”, through firsthand observation of the theme. In this case, he painted the nebulous and misty nocturnal landscape of Venice’s Grand Canal, emptying into the Adriatic in a tempestuous night.

 

The free brushstrokes seamlessly serve the picture’s impressionistic making, which dilutes and merges the elements – sky, sea and fog – as well as the buildings, imbuing them with an eerie atmosphere of post-romantic sensibility through its grayish-blue and brown towns. This atmosphere is only punctuated here and there by brief notes of pale lights or yellowish reflections on the dark water or on some building’s window, whose shadows rise sharp and massive in the painting’s inferior plane.

 

At the top of the painting, the clouds’ movements accidentally interrupt the moon´s spectral light, reinforcing the sense of dynamism of the elements that the image suggests. This dynamism is opposed by the two mooring pole’s dark vertical shadows, which stand solitary and resilient on the left.

 

Night at the Channel, a small scale work, can be interpreted as a personal memory aid of the artist, who traveled to Italy on several occasions and manifested his fascination with Venice several times in the work he produced, for example in Um “Traghetto”, or Pôr-do-sol no Canal Grande [Sunset at the Grand Canal], both belonging to the CAM Collection.

 

 

AFC

January 2011