Póvoa do Varzim Beach

A recurrent theme in Portuguese naturalist painting, which also captivated Silva Porto and Marques de Oliveira, Póvoa de Varzim is evoked in this painting by João Vaz, in a display of its fishing activities. However, although such activity may be intense, bringing together crowds of people and lots of boats, it is presented to us here as an impression more than as a narrative, achieving a theatrical effect of distance. Against this backdrop, which displays the central action of the composition, the essential themes are highlighted: the great expanse of sand, constructed in a slightly ascending and progressively more illuminated perspective, and the strip of sky, which, on the left, becomes merged with the sea and, on the right, rests upon the red-pointed keel of a boat. The whites of the sails disperse the light from the composition, which is then prolonged in the wispy clouds that distance the foreground from the sky.
It is easy to understand what captivates the painter’s work: the inscription on the support of a multiple reality, which confuses forms and shuns details in the majestic framing of nature, being capable of absorbing it almost organically. For this reason, the brushstrokes become a patch evoking boats and people – fleeting signs that our eyes pick up – stretching into the entire ground of the sky and reverberating in the sand in a sparkling soundlessness. This set of solutions is the pictorial theme of the work, in which one can see the evolution of the naturalist system that, without ceasing to portray a concrete place, tends to concentrate on its formal and chromatic expressiveness. Even so, João Vaz dwells on the distribution of the human groups – women, men, old people, children – paying attention to the particularities of the costumes and attitudes that evoke the harsh difficulties of this work. Raquel Henriques da Silva