Luís Soares, a Mozambican, thirty five years old, as red-haired as Van Gogh, as bright as Seneca, as prolific as Picasso, as easy as Leonardo, was transplanted to Cascais and there he dreams of his Southeast Africa's home and the Babylonian townarts to which he goes every now and then. But, at this moment, we are not interested in Soares' biography; only in his deeds - in what is here, before all of us. When you know Luís Soares, you stand in wonder before his artistic many-sidedness. In the plastic arts there is nothing he is not versed in, however such a phrase leads you to think about a workmanship for which he has the talents, although excelling them, as the fine artist he is.

Of the art structure's three functions - to make - to express - to symbolise - Soares carries out astonishingly the first. After all, he lives in a time where in the "gestura-lism", the "concretism" and the happening makes you understand that the truth enlightening the art is the fact that you make it. Through this conclusion Soares applies himself to his drawings, paintings, sculptures and ceramics, as if all of them would be the same thing - as they, actually, do - but knowing very well each language's univocality and individuality. His lines are so strenuous that they will change into incisions or relieves. As soft as a musical and rhythmical theory, his arm, his hand, slide with quickness, but never converting his art into one "action painting".

Luís Soares moistens his brushes with what the scholastics would call "abundantia cordis" and with a very lively sensitiveness.

The surfaces limited by lines - because his remarkable propensity to roundish shapes - symbolize a prevailingly womanly universe: in ceramics because of his volumes of spherical or cylindrical generatrix; in planes structures because of his schematic figures: circumferences, secant and eccentrical circles, faces with great eyes.

It is a commonplace to say about Luís Soares' works that they would show a certain primitivness. I do not personally recognise this - I presume they don't show a rough spontaneity but a fluid expression of his vital extroverted attitude, what has not hindered the cultural reflections' sedimentation revealing different propensities.

Before reality's or abstraction's "simulacrum", Soares, without abstruse researches, without simulations or flowery styles, without anguishes or pains, puts himself in the actual art's vehement discourse changing into signs what you could name "plastic concepts", putting together his works, with that self-acting lyricism that distinguishes him.

All Soares' artistic creations reveal a Venus' worship, a human and oceanic dimension populated by womanly creatures, a world of infatuated beings, a rise of motherhood and nymphes; an enclosed space without atmosphere, an undersea room. It is not perchance that Soares' more frequent emblematical symbol is a spinescent fish of an antique kind, only existing in his nostalgic aquarium.

His work's quick accomplishment leads him to use all the possible materials. He prefers the more rapid techniques - oils, water-colours, temperas - with mediums/holders that do not need a lot of preparation: handmade papers, for instance, though he does not reject any other experiences You will also come across this same attitude in sculpture, where the heavier matter's presence renders still more difficult the language's spiritualization. In this field, Soares behaves in a more simple and paradoxical way. He models, with abrasives or sharp-edged implements - let alone his typical quickness - a block of stiff polyurethane, afterwards transmuted in bronze. The issue is an alien mixture of roughness and refinedness in a anthropomorphical and totemic figure.

In ceramics, where he also makes plates and pots, as well as painted glazed tiles, his work has been neither formal nor superficial; he has searched for constituents, formulas and techniques, till achieving some peculiar outputs in which the unique "vice" would be a individual mannerism's danger.

What he establishes, with this or that language, with one or another technique, is the dialogue with the elementary forces; but this does not mean that Soares is limited or, even less, ingenuous. I think it is the meaning of Soares's work. The onlooker will realise the artists intention because the artwork, such as Milton C. Nham claims, is an event that joins artist and watcher in the same creative doing.