After what feels like a very long lockdown due to Covid 19, I am back in Lisbon and am visiting a fist exhibition again: Duarte Vitoria at the Espaço Exhibitionista Gallery.

This is one of my favorite Lisbon galleries, showing a new exhibition of contemporary Portuguese artists every month.

In this exhibition, Duarte Vitoria presents drawings and paintings of female figures. They are unsettling, distorted, foreshortened.

In some of the paintings, the skeleton seems to protrude beneath the skin. In others, the figures are contorted and seem in agony.

Some seem to have a sexual note, but it is unclear what is happening.

In the exhibition catalogue, well known Portuguese writer Valter Hugo Mae describes the work as ” a study on the extremes in physicality. They approach the near abnormality of gesture, searching as the demanding choreographer, for the unforeseen or at least perceptible movement in our daily reading”.

I find that as unclear as the feelings I have when seeing these paintings.

There is definitely a feeling of anguish and some irritation.

A series of drawings in charcoal are the works that I prefer, and I am told they are drawn with live models, starting as blind drawings, with the artist not looking at the paper.

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I can see anguish and pain and the direct eye contact with the viewer has something of a call for help.

I was puzzling if these two half figure portraits are of the same woman in different roles, with almost the same expression. The titles “Squeeze” and “Memorie” do not give any clue. The way of applying paint is rough, with large patches of colours:

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The skin tones are picking up the tone of the background so that the figures seem flatter and paler, again staring straight to the viewer, but here with a more defiant look, almost arrogant.

There is an unease in the poses that is very clearly transferred to me, the viewer. I feel like an uninvited onlooker in some intimate, intriguing and anguishing setting.