Pines

A gloomy landscape, of no clearly identifiable place, this is a variant of countless pictorial exercises conducted by Silva Porto, who, whenever his academic duties allowed him to do so, performed these exercises outdoors, in the open air, working on the motif and transposing pieces of nature onto the planimetric support. Whether beautiful or ugly, these exercises represented for the artist the repeated chance to shape the forms of vegetation, the ground and the sky into brightly coloured, rapidly drawn and skilfully executed patches, where the light introduces a naturalist dynamic that, in this case, can be seen in the path that can more or less be made out in the foreground. Attention should also be drawn to his mastery in the creation of the invented depth of the painting, suggesting a repetitive effect of distance that exacerbates the loneliness of the place, a territory filled with plants, where the very presence of the painter is erased or mirrored in the bodies of the pine-trees and in the scrub vegetation running close to the ground.
With works such as this one, Silva Porto sought to do more than just capture nature: he wanted to transform it into painting, through shades and hues of a minimal palette, composed of yellows, greens and browns, that is only softened by the pale blue of the sky. There is a kind of musical aesthetics in the procedure, as if the colours were musical notes abstractly intertwined into rhythms.
Raquel Henriques da Silva