THE FULFILLMENT OF A THREATENED AMOROUS DISCOURSE

Isabel Barahona (Cascais, 1974), visual artist and teacher, has a background in sculpture, painting, glass, and drawing (Ar.Co, 1993/96) and completed a postgraduate course in Painting at FBAUL (2005/06). She studied painting in Brussels and holds a PhD in Visual Arts from the Polytechnic University of Valencia. In 2013, as part of her postdoctoral studies, she received a scholarship from the University of Rennes 2, where she conducted research on the origins of an online archive project about artist books and self-publishing in Portugal. She began her artistic career in 2001 with a solo exhibition titled "mythologies" and has since participated in numerous solo and group shows in Portugal and abroad, including the notable 2018 group exhibition "Ar" at the Municipal Museum of Faro. Vasco Vidigal, who commented on her work (Artadentro, Municipal Museum of Faro, 2009/2010), evokes regarding the series presented in 2003 "tu es mon pays" the "memory of the creative process" that transforms the pictorial surface into a "landscape marked and revealing of the passage of time." This process deepens subsequently, converging the assumed intimacy of circumstances and external phenomena. (...) This kind of "introspective drift" leads her to use drawing "as a privileged form of investigation and inventorying" of the feminine condition. In a relationship always assumed between the lyrical coordinates of an intimate and wonderful world and an invasive and hostile reality. The four linocut prints she currently presents, an interaction between subjective writings of an accentuated lyrical aspect and evocative backgrounds of fingerprints, reflect her previous concerns and her artistic journey. The inscriptions of words on the skin, which seem to symbolize here the subtle fabric of the soul: "agora aqui dizer-te tempo querer-te nós boca" ("now here telling you loving you us mouth"), "tatua-me e canta comigo" ("tattoo me and sing with me"), "agora aqui" ("now here"), "dizer-te querer-te" ("telling you loving you"), "tempo nós" ("time us"), have the meaning of a desired amorous dialogue always interrupted by all the external vicissitudes