Eurico Lino do Vale – Summer 2009

Eurico Lino do Vale was born in Oporto in 1966. He studied photography at “Centro de Arte e Communicação Visual” and also at the Kunstakademie, Dusseldorf and London’s Royal College of Art. He lives and works in Lisbon.

The main subject of Lino do Vale’s photographic work is centred on the portrait. Developed in different series, they are specific in time with each one enhancing a particular aspect of the main theme. In his different series of portraits (the pre-adolescents, portraits of old people from a Lisbon quarter, portraits of men or the more recent shadows), Lino do Vale persistently searches for the human presence and the vestiges of the photographic instant: the trace of that presence. He describes those portraits as encounters, and acknowledges the fictional aspect of that encounter between the two elements of the equation: the subject and the photographer, with the photograph being an act of conversion between those two different realities.

“The tombs of the kings of Portugal” was exposed in the Dukes of Cadaval Palace during summer 2009.

Developed throughout 2006 and early 2007, the tombs of the kings of Portugal is one of Lino do Vale’s most profound and extreme work. He speaks of the series as portraits, but we see the places empty, rendering them as an almost abstract quality. It is through the absence of the body that Lino do Vale succeed in making his most radical statement about the presence of the subject, which becomes memory, symbol, void, timelessness, pure presence.

Web:

• www.linodovale.com.sapo.pt