Perfume of the fields

Using a referential treatment of sign, this composition suggests a critical reading of urban progress and industrialization. The simplicity of the message allowed Fialho de Almeida to call "soda pop" to the "goddess" that could serve "as a poster for any beverage factory, for which it had the necessary characteristics."
In an industrial zone, probably London, a city visited by the artist, under a tonal blue sky, hallucinations of bodies appear in despair. In contrast, at the top of the mountain hovers an imaginary female figure that perfumes it with white lilies. Wrapped in a veil of violet transparencies that marks the character's movement, it introduces innocence and purity, goals of a "lost paradigm", verdant with freshness. The sinuosity of its lines, gesture and curly hair, are one of the rare examples of Art Nouveau aesthetic in Portuguese painting, although the face shows a naturalistic treatment. Elaborated in successive contrasts, the work emphasizes civilizational and aesthetic confrontations, between reality and dream.
Prefiguring ecological concerns, at the turn of the nineteenth century to the XX, this emblematic "mother nature" is represented in an "entirely new genre" (Ribeiro Artur). Together with these hallucinations, he launches the composition to another dimension, that is, to an animation that brings it closer to the first experiences of the Magic Lantern, to the fanciful dioramas of Daguerre and to the early cinematographic essays.
An active and traveled spirit, Luciano Freire stays in Paris and London for some time, where he contacts technical and cultural progress, between factories and cinema, and the latest symbolistic aesthetic trends.