Eclectic in the influences and in the thematic, most talented as a designer (one can feel confidence in his drawings), as a ceramist (he controls the technique) and as a sculptor (he is experimentalist in his style), Luís Soares is linked, in his artistic course, to all the investigation precepts of painting, sculpture and ceramic.

His personages emit a message to the air to listen to the totemic inquisitors it conceals. Provocative with the freakish taste of an unexpected calamity occurred in times of calmness, the painter gives life to that heterogeneous instinct that he transmits with a rare sense of communication, to the linear profile of his figures.

Images of vortex and action - paroxymic themes, revealing a tumultuous interior agitation - , seen through an expressiveness of a different kind of art, acts of strength under the disguise of known images, drawn undoubtely by a person familiarised with thanks to his conceptions, beliefs and emotions. His prolix work,

almost incomprehensive due to his complexity, has no place in the superficial art that obtains success in our society today. In his work, we feel a conceptual critic, drawn with a remarkable talent.

The agressive tecniques, the original sensibility, the high perspicacity and the grotesque figures, achieved through an acrobatic and caricatural style like most individual artists, those who enjoy the pleasure, the satirical admiration of the Picasso talent in the very fascination of the painting show.

Soares works with telluric elements, allegorical metaphors which remind sorcery associated with spiritual elements, that finds its equilibrium between the interior feelings and the external reality, Valleinclanizada through his unconscient instinct which is a mixture of intentions, shock, euphoria, impetus, satire of the established values and the practice of a genuine art.! Soares superstar! ...

It would be almost impossible to compile, in a commentary, all the gradation of colours of Luís Soares' palette. However, it would be far worse trying to rediscover it. Thus, if the reader/spectator wishes to be impregnated with the sensations produced by the paintings of this Portuguese painter of Mozambican origin, he has to detach from them the invention displays of the pathetical comedy of time and of life, as well as the problematic about the survival of the protagonists' souls, solved through his own expressive means.

Having an idea of what is shown in the exposition is to recognize the senses that makes him paint as an expressive orgy. To specify my perspective on Soares' work (that is, in short, a vigilant critic), which is in full creation in what concerns imagination and esthetical knowledge in technical terms, I borrow some lines from the excellent writing of Maria Zambrano to comment the figure and the work of Luís Soares in its individual and analytical context: "When the artist creates, he reproduces the divinal creation and creations an eternity... virtually. lt is a game, the complex game of the art". Art in graphical attitude as an answer from the individual to the object, a plastic art accomplishment that speaks for itself of the modern reasons to impose the image (the magic of the different image, resulting from assemblages of active figures and of spectral forms of the pictorial resources which are his most common means of expression. Thence his well delimited paintings that allow us to impute a cold, calculating and geometric proportion, more manual than resulting from the knowledge through visual and environmental geography, the natural ambit that is the most identifying and descriptive pillar to transfigure his artistic work.

The polymorphism of Soares displays the work of a designer with enough consistency to make his work attractive. This process fascinates both because of its basic structures and the similarity links that identify him, without abysses, in his distinct (but not antagonical) ways of working. They are not associations but expansions. If one wishes to understand them through the content of an absolute independence, it is decisive to discover the findings that mobilize the spectator's fantasy, that distinguish a personality that surpasses schools and tendencies and gives lessons of art, showing how it is possible to preserve, in the misterious, disturbing, magic and surrealistic current, his copious compositions.

The specific language, with certains notes of kandinskyanism, represents his pictorial expression that oscillates from real to marvelous and that makes us face new surprises and realize that the previous ones are also valid.

As he penetrates the depths of intimacy, following his artistic feelings that impel him to find himself, the important elements of his work become united, sheltered.

The spontaneity of the colour and of the lines - resulting of almost a mental improvisation - shows the copious creativity of the plastic artist Luís Soares, Portuguese and universal: creator of a personal world!

(1) (N.T) O vocábulo vem de Rámon del Valle-Inclán (c.1866-1936), escritor galego que se inspirava na mitologia e folclore da sua região. Sonatas, a sua primeira obra amadurecida, expressava a decadência modernista. Foi um renovador do teatro contemporâneo, ambicioso, que dizia adaptar-se a sua arte ao que chamava técnica do espantalho. No romance Tirano Banderas descreve uma ditadura numa república imaginária da América Latina.