Exhibition “Colors of the Land and the Sea”, by José Vila

On May 17, and as part of the anniversary of the Museum of Portimão, the opening of the exhibition “Colors of the Land and the Sea”, by José Vila (1944-2021), is scheduled for 17:00 pm, which presents us with a retrospective journey of his 64 years of activity as a painter, since his first painting at the age of 13, in 1957, until his last works of 2021, at the age of 77.

José Duarte Martins da Silva (1944-2021), better known as  José Vila, was born in Mexilhoeira-Grande (Portimão), having attended the Painting and Drawing Courses at ARCO and  Mosaic and Art History at IADE. During his youth, with great enthusiasm and intensity, he recited to his friends  verses by the Colombian writer, poet and activist José Vargas Vila, which was  one of the reasons why he began to be treated as Vila.

But it would be in his homeland, in  the “Adega Vila Lisa”, opened  in 1981, with his friend José Lisa, that José Vila would become a builder of  a very particular form of commensal and gastronomic conviviality, through the offer of authenticity and simplicity of the flavor of Algarve products,  sharing the  aesthetic  expressiveness  of his paintings, that we can observe  in this  exhibition “COLORS OF LAND AND SEA”.

This   exhibition proposes a retrospective journey  of the  64 years of his activity as a painter, from his first painting  at the age of 13, in 1957, to his last works of 2021.

The path of  his artistic creativity  was soon characterized by freedom in the use and application of colors and a diversity of mixture of tones, shapes, lines, textures and  materials, expressing his emotions and experiences through an informalist language, breaking with  any  figurative representation.

Free, vigorous and expressive brushstrokes restore her spontaneity, without rigid rules or concerns with traditional aesthetics, valuing above all the energy of the movement of her gestures in the creative process.