LUIS ATHOUGUIA


Born in Cascais, Portugal in 1953. Certification in Arts and Design by IADE, Lisbon.
Exhibits since 1983, in more than two hundred important events.

Comments about his work

“... his painting reveals a search for signs, interior and
exterior, in constant dialogue between light and material,
between the voices of the soul and the almost carnal forms that
seem to inhabit some of his paintings as living and autonomous
organisms. Throughout all his work passes, in unmistakable
tones, an expressed wish or an uncontained dream of freedom
and harmony, which echoes in all of us.”

“In the intimacy of his work... the minimum gesture reflects
a personal religion or healthy skepticism and a fragile equilibrium
in the stroke that defines the frisson of his own vertiginous life,
and is an eternal rebirth to the daily exercise of meditation, as in
gestured Zen... evoking, in the symbolism of his wise strokes,
the memory of the gothic mirages of Manuelism in search of
those spiritual Indias where, in vortexes of light, is sighted the
hope of a redemption...”

“They are pathetic pilgrimages through oneiric, erotic-sentimental
landscapes, an almost obsessive fascination by the
curvilineal escape, aIluding to a deliberately interminable
spaciality.
“… the solitary grandness of the interior landscapes drapes
itself in caprichious forms that the prodigious luxuriousness of
sensibility and imagination creates, a bit each day, a bit in each
work.”

“... Pieces of dreams, gardens for our eyes to wander in,
obscure remembrances, intermittent illuminations, fugitive
words, windows of his soul, his natural breathing... Luis' painting is encounter and divergence, a certain dose of solitude,
an echo, a tenuous bridge, the light of dawn, the discreet
ondulating of the sea in the dryness of the landscape, the border
between yesterday and today, a journey project.”

One-Person Exhibitions
Galeria São Mamede, Lisboa - Paços do Concelho, Ponta Delgada - Galeria Velasquez, Valladolid - Galeria Maria Lebre, Tomar - Galeria Escudeiros, Beja - Casa Vieira Guimarães, Tomar - Galeria de Fitares, Sintra - Galeria Pepper’s, Caldas da Rainha - Galeria de Arte do Barreiro – Galeria 4 Montras, Viseu - Galeria de Arte de Abrantes - Fábrica das Artes, Torres Vedras - Galeria de Arte de Albufeira - Capela da Misericórdia em Sines - Centro Cultural de Lagos - Museu de Electricidade, Lisboa – Convento de S. José, Lagoa - Palácio Pombal, IADE, Lisboa – Museu Martins Correia, Golegã - Galeria Artur Bual, Paços do Concelho da Amadora – Galeria C T T, Lisboa – Galeria BCN Art Direct, Barcelona - MAC Movimento de Arte Contemporânea, Lisboa.

Some Collective Exhibitions
MAC Movimento de Arte Contemporânea, Lisboa - Galeria S. Mamede, Lx - Galeria Potthoff, Lx - Galeria 65 A, Lx - Galeria Conventual, Alcobaça - Galeria Arthouse, Cascais - Quinta das Cruzadas, Sintra - Galeria Fitares, Sintra – Galeria LCR, Sintra - Galeria Iosephus, Lx - Die Galerie, Ericeira - Galeria Fábrica das Artes, T. Vedras - Galeria Cólicas, Ponte do Rol – Galeria Pedra do Guilhim, Nazaré - Galeria Pirâmide, Lx - Galeria Ler Devagar, Lx - Espaço Pedralvas, Lx - Marea Negra “Prestige”, Recinto Ferial de Pontevedra, Espanha - Centro Cultural de Belém, Lx – Centro Cultural da Nazaré - Galeria Pedro Sem, Lx - Galeria Maré d’Arte, Carvoeiro – Galeria BCN Art Direct, Barcelona – Unesco Palace, Beirut, Líbano - Museu Regional de Sintra - Museu de Electricidade, Lx - Palácio Foz, Lx - Palácio da Independência, Lx – Museu de Arte Sacra, Alcochete - Convento de Cristo, Tomar - Convento da Graça, T. Vedras - Convento de S. Francisco, Monsaraz.

Biennuals
Vila Nova de Cerveira, Cascais, Sabugal, Avante, F. P. de
Lisboa, Alentejo, Góis, Amadora, Montijo.

Distinguished with the Vespeira Prize of Drawing in Portugal