Isabel Barahona (Cascais, 1974), a visual artist and teacher, has a background in sculpture, painting, glass, and drawing (Ar.Co, 1993/96) and completed a postgraduate degree 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 a postdoctoral program, she received a grant from the University of Rennes 2 to conduct research on the origins of an online archive about artist books and self-publishing in Portugal. She began her artistic career in 2001 with a solo exhibition entitled "mythologies" and has since participated in numerous solo and group shows in Portugal and abroad, including the 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 the "memory of the making process" that transforms the pictorial surface into a "landscape marked and revealing of the passage of time" in reference to the series presented in 2003, "tu es mon pays". Subsequently, her process deepened, merging assumed intimacy with external circumstances and phenomena. (...) This kind of "introspective drift" led her to use drawing as a privileged form of investigation and inventory of the female condition. In a constant dialogue between the lyrical coordinates of an intimate and marvelous world and an invasive and hostile reality. The four linoleum prints she currently presents, an interaction between subjective writings with a pronounced lyrical aspect and backgrounds reminiscent of fingerprints, reflect her previous concerns and artistic journey. The inscriptions of words on the skin, which seem to symbolize the subtle fabric of the soul, such as "agora aqui dizer-te tempo querer-te nós boca" (now here tell you time want you us mouth), "tatua-me e canta comigo" (tattoo me and sing with me), "agora aqui" (now here), "dizer-te querer-te" (tell you want you), "tempo nós" (time us), convey the meaning of a desired amorous dialogue that is constantly interrupted by all external vicissitudes that threaten its plenitude.

Maria João Fernandes - International Association of Art Critics (AICA)