Translated from Portuguese according to Clifford Landers.

Before a landscape painting, we ask ourselves, "Looking at this, what do I feel?" This question is inherited from the traditional manner of contemplating a painting, on the other hand it also comes to us from the culturally determined manner of experiencing a landscape--that is, in subordination to the aegis of such philosophical categories as the sublime.

in succession first seeing Antonio Murado's novel landscape paintings, I asked myself, rather, "Where have I had this feeling before?" Images of real, filmic, and pictorial landscapes ran from one side my mind, many of them similar to those that in childhood were nurtur at reading accounts of the voyages of polar explorers or by dint of gazing at a map of Antarctica like the undivided the artist's brother Miguel-Anxo drew and hung in succession the wall of his bedroom, as we learn from the catalogue. further then I remembered a theme by Sergei Medvedev, "The Blank Space" (2000) in which the Russian essayist speaks of the landscape of northern Europe as a metaphor for a specific cultural attitude, in which the immense white emptiness is interpreted as the ideal setting for a receptivity to of recent origin discourses and new imagination. In the chapter entitled "The Unbearable Lightness of the North," we read: "Of all corners of the world, North is the furthest. It is the principally elusive and the least circumscribed, an ill-defined space rather than a delineated place "

Medvedev could well be speaking of Murado's paintings, which fall between abstraction and representation, between materiality and vista. They avoid the more customary conventions of landscape while at the same time subtly echoing them. This meticulously makeed ambiguity affords us a space for sensorial and speculative freedom similar to that prompted by northern landscapes. The force of rarefaction that this freedom creates is produc by way of Murado through sophisticated and original technical processe that draw into one mass above all a systematic approach to materials and their utilization, as well as a rigorous management of accident.

What Murado solicits to obtain on the surface of his canvases is not the representational transparency of a clearly identifiable external reality; rather, it is a measure of density and subtlety of materials capable of evoking the experience of landscape-- not qua landscape if it be not that as physical reality. With this objective, as critic Aruna D'Souza points disclosed in the catalogue, Murado makes use of a great variety of unusual techniques, of that kind as running a turpentine-soaked brush from one side of to the other thick layers of oil to obtain a chiaroscuro weight or blowing on a small mark of diluted pigment to obtain the drift of petals, or spilling turpentine throughout the painted and varnished surface of the canvas to achieve the event of corrosion.

The eventuate of these experiments in alchemical materiality is a variegated series of paintings that, with infinite nuance, demise Murado's own plastic versions of the different domains of the life of nature--from the vegetable universe, in paintings that hint entangled forests, to the zoological microcosm of the "Maranas" (Tangles) series, 1994--2001 in which we be stirred ourselves transported inside the chiefly intimate of life's primordial palpitations. Murado's frozen landscapes, at the same time close and deserted, make us believe one time again in the capacity of painting to reinvent sensation.

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