Before the instant ends: "O Dia Está Pronto", by Francisca Pinto

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DATE

04 May 2026

AUTHOR

Tomás Camillis

Before the instant ends: "O Dia Está Pronto", by Francisca Pinto

AUTHOR

Tomás Camillis

The following text is a series of four essays on Francisca Pinto’s exhibition O Dia Está Pronto. I had intended to write more pieces, but as I wrote, I realized they were converging into more robust interpretive perspectives that I did not feel it would be productive to force into a single narrative. After all, her works also present us with scenes where the impulse toward convergence perhaps does not consume them entirely.

1/ In these works, there is always just one figure, although it is more difficult than one might suppose to classify identities — what, for example, are stones: figures or background? Since the figure is what stands out from the background, declaring it means opting for an ontological perspective that reshapes the entire world, because it alters the web of relationships that define the identity of each thing: what would the stone become, outside a context centred on the human? Where does the stoniness of the stone lie? In the stone itself or in the subject who perceives it? In these works, it is precisely the ontological condition of the human that is at stake, their identity – by addressing, above all, the contact between distinct phenomena (the impact of the elements on the solidity of bodies), they perhaps attempt to reveal to us a nature where everything intersects to transform itself. And yet, their arrangement centres the human within the landscape, privileging them as a figure. The scenes reveal moments of instability, yet their composition stabilises the human form. For highlighting the figure from the background is to privilege the subject over the object, thought over experience, autonomy over communication – perhaps the opposite of Francisca's proposal, which presents us with humans transformed into stones, into light, into stars. The artist even makes use of complementary colours to place the human figure in the foreground, emphasising its importance – whereas Cubism did the opposite in order to merge figure and background into a new natural configuration: it eschewed chromatic interplay in favour of a spatially dissolved volumetry. It seems to me there is a rupture here: these are works interested in the transformative contact between opposites, yet they do not decentralise the figure’s status as a perceptive subject, which, being distinct from nature, organises the landscape around it. Her painting Spread Again evokes Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog by Caspar Friedrich—but the Romantics, whilst sanctifying nature, still viewed it as a mere stimulus for the subject’s spiritual ascent. Thus, I wonder if his figure (being also a starfish) might not have a less triumphant understanding of itself, since it is led to contemplate existence through a perspective decentralised from modern concerns.

2/ Her figures thus take on a solitary air, as if resigned to this state of imposed dialogue. Though touched by the landscape, they do not seem moved by it either. They do not achieve absolute communion; there is something deep within them that still resists, preventing them from transcending themselves. Some even lose their sense of scale, allowing us to perceive them as stone giants gazing at a sunset forever distant, or staring at us with sadness and despondency (there is almost always a single eye looking at us). It is interesting to note the absence of faces in these works. The only figure that reveals its face to us, in Spread Again, may well be masked. In a way, they seem painted from a distance, as if the artist were avoiding their drama, their silent unease. Francis Bacon approached this differently, blurring human features with a smear of paint, thereby dissolving the identity of the being that confers identity upon other things. For if the human being being portrayed is itself the enigma, then categories cease to exist. Perhaps the absence of the face is a way of emphasising the presence of the body, of the natural immanence where everything comes into contact, for it belongs to a fabric of relationships.

3/ This inner resistance is also explored in classical poses, at times – the reclining body and the upright posture are variations on the same principle: the human being as the stable core of existence, which, being self-sufficient, does not need to move. It is the world that comes to us, here in the form of inclement weather. Are her works capturing the imminence of change, the solid creature on the verge of breaking free? In this sense, Francisca intensifies the relationship between the desire to remain and the advent of change – her works are more an extension of contact than a real transformation: in Unpack the sun, the sun is plunging into the ocean. And New Perspectives reveals to us a repentant being who, already transformed, wishes to return to the rigid state of the other paintings (and the stones around them), embracing a handful of rocks to form the shape of a triangle, the most stable of solids. Are such works more about self-rejection than about transformation? The human appears altered, yet does not escape from itself. Even when camouflaged within a structure of stones, some details anchor it to a conventional anatomy: the hairstyle, the footprint, the pose, the breasts, the joints, the eyes. An anatomy that has never been transformed becomes more flexible, thereby diminishing the impact of the contacts that become schematised relationships between fixed agents. The essences remain unchanging – like a sphinx which, rather than being a new creature, is the partial union of three creatures, a hybrid of fixed structures.

4/ Of the works on display, it is in New Perspectives that Francisca best reveals her chromatic sensibility, or what Deleuze (commenting on Francis Bacon) called the ‘colour sensation’. Many painters have become enamoured of this sensation, using colour to diminish the importance of drawing. For colour creates atmospheres rather than principles, constructing a sentimental space where we experience the work beyond thought — more passion than intellect, more enigma than analysis: this, for example, is the Venetian maxim. Giorgione imbues his scenes with a metaphysics of twilight, when the dying sun bathes everything in a divine gold to fix the poetic principle of each element. Only later will colour and light corrode the forms, dissolving them into a reality beyond silhouettes — I think of Turner, Kandinsky, Gorky. Perhaps, then, it is only in modernity that we understand nature as a dynamic principle, changing at every moment and transforming what was once seen as a fixed form into a continuous process (the Book of Genesis presents the universe as the stable creation of a transcendent intelligence, and ancient Greece viewed the cosmos as the play of forms in harmony). In this nature in perpetual transition, nothing remains stable — everything changes gradually, driven by the impulse to become something else that does not yet exist.

But although she dedicates herself to color, Francisca Pinto doesn't abandon form either. Thus, she ends up preserving the categories of things—which is perhaps contrary to her interest in the theme of metamorphosis? Iridescence can dissolve boundaries, allowing things to become something else, launching themselves into a still unknown chromatic abyss, projecting them in a silent impulse that doesn't know where it's going. Even a stone moves slowly. The intensity of her paintings (including the gestural quality of the brushstrokes) creates in everything a sensation of trembling, a nature on its edge, but which ultimately doesn't transcend itself in metamorphosis. She uses the elements to explore the contact between opposites, but she doesn't question the categories that compose it—a stone has its condition as a stone attenuated by the impact of light, but it doesn't cease to be a stone. Therefore, I don't think it's color that constructs these works, but drawing—color is primarily a filling that sometimes destabilizes forms, but without dissolving their boundaries. The light even enhances the contours in a golden line that outlines the forms. Still, there is a beautiful, epidermal work that sometimes creates a patina of translucency in the painting: the stones in New Perspectives vibrate like domes of light. Its layers of paint are thin, preserving in everything a solar phantasmagoria that reminds me of the experience of contemplating Gothic stained glass, and, in fact, the skin of her figure in New Perspectives resembles such. Were it all a painting, or worked to transform the delineated form into a formal experience, perhaps it would resemble what Barnett Newman wrote about cathedrals: his goal was, following in Michelangelo's footsteps, "to make a cathedral of the human," or rather, to make a cathedral of himself, to finally explode the forms in a sublime exaltation that would expand our existence.

Curated by Filipa da Rocha Nunes, the exhibition O Dia Está Pronto, by Francisca Pinto, can be visited at Dialogue until May 16.

BIOGRAPHY

Tomas Camillis is an author and researcher based in Lisbon, working on fiction and on essays in the interplay between art, philosophy and literature. He has a master's degree in Art Theory by PUC-RJ. In recent years he has participated in researches, taught courses in cultural institutes, helped organize conferences and published in specialized magazines. He currently collaborates with the MAC/CCB Educational Service and Umbigo magazine.

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