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Miguel Branco – Summer 2009
Miguel Branco was born in Castelo Branco in 1963. He lives and works in Lisbon. He studied painting at the “Facultade de Belas Artes de Lisboa”, and teaches at “Centro de Arte e Communicação Visual” since 1989, where he heads the Painting department.
Two fundamental aspects are quite evident when we first encounter Miguel Branco’s work. The first is a particular use of scale: most of his paintings and sculptures are of a small scale, sometimes even smaller than the size of a postcard. The second is the way the work relates to tradition, techniques and themes present in Art History.
Scale is a structural aspect of composition in Branco’s work and therefore is not related to the history of the miniature: reduction becomes for him a mechanism of amplifying space, intensity, visibility, and attention to surface – aspects that are essential to all his work. It is through reduction of scale that he constitutes a minor mode, which aims to expand perception, and it is through low art categories (B movies, commix, cartoons), that he constitutes a world of references based on insignificance. It is not through the use of large scale, intricate compositions or elaborate meanings that his work gain a sense of material intensity, but precisely the opposite: through discreetness, irony, absence and simplicity.
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