Menez

A granddaughter of general Óscar Carmona, Maria Inez Ribeiro da Fonseca began her career as a self-taught artist, having her first exhibitions at the Março Gallery in 1954. ¶ Throughout the 50s, Menez' paintings clearly revealed an influence from the School of Paris, in particular from its penchant for lyricism and poetic reverie. Although at first they were more abstract, figurativism soon became more prominent. But if there was any facet that has been ever-present in her painting, it would be luminosity, expressed through an ethereal, watery chromatism. ¶ As for the 60s, they've witnessed an opening up to pop art and oil painting, which guided Menez to object-painting or object-selecting as her main theme, at a time when she was a recipient of a Gulbenkian Foundation scholarship in London. ¶ Possessor of sensuous, sublimated lines, whether dealing with human faces or abstract surfaces, Menez embraced the creation of a luminous wholeness. Representation itself managed to achieve a spatial effect, in the sense that her paintings carried out the suggestion of placement, of depth-of-field, of an overlaying of level surfaces that remind one of different space typologies: perhaps an open space under daylight, perhaps an inhabitable closed space in the foreground with a long landscape in the background, perhaps even a stage-like space with a "trompe l'oeil" backdrop. ¶ By the end of the 70s, Menez' oeuvre entered yet a new phase. The theatrical traits of its staging and the emergence of characters became paramount, as if in a naïve revisiting of the most crystal-clear of staged fantasies. In the 80s, it would finally reach its iconographical vocation, with a stronger turn towards figurativism. Inspired mainly by the imagetics of the 18^th century, Menez recreated the narrational notions of suspension and suggestion, not to mention the intimate, shrewd milieus of the time. However, Menez adds to it a disturbing, almost morbid elegance. Her characters are placed in the gardens and the interiors as signs of a lunar, disaffected presence.

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