The painting barely exceeds the size of a postcard. Miguel Branco had returned from two years of study in London, in 1998, with two fundamental artistic choices: the use of wood as primary support and the radical reduction in the scale of his oils. If previously, he could be hailed as one of the chief petits maîtres in Portuguese painting (with little tradition in that noble lineage that runs from Chardin to Morandi), from there on, owing to a more intense and dense pictorial concentration in minimum centimetres, Branco managed to infuse his miniatures with the same authority and gravity of larger scales, able to sustain for a long time the casual look of those who first discover them. Such is the preciousness of this small format, furthermore accentuated through the green pigment, luminescent and refined, which the brushwork spreads and sprawls with delectation over the wood.

The intense material sensation emanating from painting takes place regardless of the rare figurative elements being shown, as this little blurry figure out of context: the painter was claiming a picture “entirely empty of meaning”, in a puritanical and anti-conceptualist quest against the tyranny of a painting with “meanings”. In that aspect, his meditated and refrained visual discourse seems to have been born in the antipodes of his generation, that was largely defined by Neo-Expressionism (exaggerated, narcissist and self-destructive) or by the cold Conceptual art. On the contrary, Miguel Branco, through his unreserved devotion to painting, was so profoundly involved in his works that he seemed to be on the brink of self-effacement.

AR