During Miguel Branco’s London period (1996-98) his paintings got used to host a looser handling of paint, in a sweeping facture that was gaining predominance at the same time it gave way to increasingly frequent figurative forms in his work. Besides, a radical reduction in the pictures’ scale took place, down to the size of miniatures that were based on the need for intimacy and decorum, or in Branco’s own words, a “discretion and concentration” in the internal language of his pictures in order to carry on his pursuit of pure painting.

A tiny creature leaves behind a brown trace by skiing across the surface of this landscape of painting, brimming with a lush yellow colour, golden and smooth – that “cryptic and condensed medium” the painter declared to be seeking. Despite a minimum of brushstrokes and the uneventful composition, Miguel Branco is able to derive from painting a certain alchemy that can afford weight, expression and evocation, and to which the old Modernist Manichaeism between abstraction and figuration seems obsolete. After all, Branco’s mute painting is not, as he himself described, a “discourse” but rather a “whisper”.

AR