Hélio Luís Portuguese, b. 1980

Hélio Luís (b. 1980, Portugal) is a self-taught artist from Lisbon, whose large format-paintings depict a space between reality and the imagination. Sourcing from literature, photography, and archival cinema, Luís confronts fraught and complex legacies such as the presence of colonialism and the “exotic” within European art and Art History, contextualizing them within the contemporary world. Luís’ gestural handling of paint ranges from the subdued to the boldly expressionistic, the technical application and materiality taking a foreground in his practice. Vibrant hues and discernible layers are juxtaposed with a refined, traditional figurativism— a collision of the past and present on the canvas.