In June 2022, thanks to a donation, the CAM Collection received a new painting by Lisa Santos Silva. Painted in 1972, it is only now available for public viewing, as it previously belonged to a private collection.

Lisa Santos Silva produced this work shortly after graduating from the Escola Superior de Belas-Artes in Porto, before she settled permanently in Paris. Visible here are some of the elements we associate with her later artistic production: the red tones, the deformed female figures and, most of all, the reference to classical painters.

While on one hand, we recognise in this painting the disfigured faces typical of the work of Francis Bacon, on the other, the fragments of bodies refer specifically to Saturn devouring his son, by Francisco Goya. Lisa Santos Silva first came into contact with Goya’s work at the age of 13, when she travelled from Angola, where she lived as a child, to Madrid: ‘Once she had cast off her African childhood, she discovered, in the Prado, that her homeland was Goya.’[1] The artist always recalls this encounter and the extent to which, years later, it would influence her work.

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Isabel Carlos suggests, in the catalogue for the artist’s solo exhibition, Are you ready Lola?, held at the Gulbenkian Foundation’s delegation in France, in 2011, that ‘after having seen a painting by Lisa Santos Silva, we will always recognise another of her works because it is a radically unique oeuvre in terms of imagery and a superb exercise in painting.’[1] It is precisely in the red colour, a clear reference to classical painting, particularly Velázquez, and to the painters of the Dutch and Flemish schools, that we find the common thread of her work.

In another of the artist’s paintings in the CAM Collection, created around 10 years later, this imagery typical of her work appears with even greater purity. The gaze of the woman facing us can be found in her other portraits; it is the timeless gaze that has met the spectator’s eye since classical painting which Lisa Santos Silva is able to skilfully reclaim.

[1] João Paulo Cotrim, ‘Horta Seca, Lisboa 26 Maio’, Jornal Macau, 2018

[2] Isabel Carlos, ‘Are you ready Lola?’ in catalogue for the exhibition Are you ready Lola? Paris: Centre Culturel Calouste Gulbenkian, 2011.