Luís Lázaro Matos

Critical text

Apparently light-hearted and playful, Luís Lázaro Matos’s (b. 1987, Évora) works actually investigate complex dynamics dealing with current social and philosophical constructions, shaping contemporary forms of narrative. In his lush and colourful graphic figurations, humour and drama coexist, opening up discourses that allude to both intimate and social dynamics, often dealing with identity politics and queerness. As metaphorical portraits of today’s communal aesthetic, imbued with his personal experiences as a digital native, Lázaro Matos’s works reveal shared emotional imageries. For Present Future the artist is showing a selection of drawings from his recent project ‘Summer Waterfalls & Autumn Leaves’ (2019), representing imaginary houses for skateboarders built on top of waterfalls, all accompanied by an original album conceived by the artist himself. Seeming like encounters between Frank Lloyd Wright’s 1935 Fallingwater, skatepark architectures, classical ruins, futuristic landscapes, monstrous creatures and quasi-animated animals, the eccentric drawings become surrealist dreamlike settings for humorous, romantic stories. The recurring waterfall acts, according to Lázaro Matos, as a powerful metaphor for the uncontainable restlessness caused by the emotional charge that drives towards the affirmation of an identity. These fantastical environments become a stage on which a personal dramaturgy is set in motion.

Text by Fernanda Brenner, Ilaria Gianni