The fishermen's neighbourhood

Dominguez Alvarez's painting is situated on the edge of the dominant production of the time. Its originality lies on a predominantly expressionist sensibility, sometimes with a dreamlike meaning almost unknown in the Portuguese painting of the 1920s and 1930s. In this painting, space is understood in two different ways: in the upper part it develops in an extensive way , by a succession of volumes that lean against each other; in the lower part, a dark area, somehow shapeless, intensely emphasizes the organization of space. The buildings are figured with great simplification of lighting processes that resort to strict conventionality. The windows, synthetic black rectangles, inserted in pairs on the walls, suggest a disturbing anthropomorphism that inhabits the interior of the seemingly deserted motif. But what transpires from there is the blackness, an absence of color that returns an absolute void to the interiority of the scene, prefiguring it as an ontological impossibility, a problematic present in other works by the artist. In that sense, another absence that stands out is that of water, replaced here by the dark foreground. Thus the seemingly coastal landscape is shifted to a non-place - see in this regard the absence of the tree's shadow - which is the emptiness of consciousness oscillating between two understandings of the perceptual space definitely separated from naturalisms reminiscent in many moderns.