Aveiro

“Who am I, if not a tormented being, like all the men, that only wants to paint, that is not mediocre only when he is painting? Who am I, if not someone that dreams with better days, for himself, for his family and friends and for his painting, and his way of talking, of communicating and his way to be in life? At the end, who am I?” Michael Barrett, Portuguese painter, born in Paris in February 13th of 1926 (son of English Mother and French father). At the age of 9 came to Portugal. Gil Graça, architect, was the one who encouraged him to paint. He died in May 6th of 2004, in Cascais. Without any doubts, he was a reference in the Portuguese art of the 20th century. Barrett accentuates a modernity in his pictorial work, defined by his extraordinary sensitivity imprinted in his quotidian scenes, that wherever he went by he felt in love with. An inner journey of analysis of the World a reality trespassing that deliver to us the right range of feelings, values and emotions in a very own and intimate pallet, both in the oil color, in the acrylic and in the watercolor profusions, as in the lone dialog of the black and grey stains like in this work of watercolor that completes the trace and the China ink that defines scripts for each lifetime; as the drawings with pen presenting streets that invite the social being, or instead, a heartfelt loneliness sensed and maintained as required. The Barrett's painting is also autobiographic, even when the other is not itself, but accepting and valuing the differences and promoting the multiplicity of each of us from ourselves: creating scenarios and humanities. A democratization of the artwork touches the neorealism, fleeing from the academicism and conventional standards of fashion. However, influenced markedly by the impressionist and expressionist school, taking as reference the master Henri Matisse, that he admired like no other painter. Therefore, in his compositions, he painted only the essential. like no other painter. Therefore, in his compositions he painted only the essential.