Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about movement. The movement of our limbs, our lips as we speak, our feet and toes as we walk, chests that rise and fall as we breathe, the halt in your chest during a pregnant pause as you inhale deeply. The movement of your phalanges as you wave hello and goodbye, your leg stretches as you crouch. And how your movements influence the movements of others around you, like a chain reaction of body actions, of speech, words and sounds.

The language you speak changes the way you produce speech, but also your way of thinking and expressing yourself. It all comes down to sounds, to the minuscule differences between vowels and consonants. My name starts with an I, which I always think about as an í, so imagine my awkwardness when asked to spell out my name in English (which I get very often) and must voice out that my í is instead an aí. There is something there that doesn’t quite fit, doesn’t feel like me, my name, who I am, the movements my mouth makes - that your mouth should make when saying my name.

These are some of the ideas swimming through my brain when I am painting. My process lacks planning – like movements, my paintings are intuitive, impulsive, often going in the wrong direction and breaking something in the process. Sometimes nothing good comes out of it, forcing me to deal with that disappointment, and work around those accidents and mistakes.

Akin to my incapacity to plan is my inability to view painting as a finished, formal object. There is a deep classical heritage to painting, preconceived ideas of what it should be, ideas that repel me: the size, the pristineness, the accuracy, the concept, the masculinity – painting as a respectable object, as the definition of Fine Art. My painting cannot be that (I can’t deal with those expectations), which led me to find fabric as a preferred surface. 

Fabric is the opposite of what painting should be. Fabric is accessible, relatively democratic, feminine, a minor art, or even decorative, as some like to call it. Fabric allows me to paint in the same way we move – undeliberate, arrhythmical, unplanned. 

There’s provocation in my painting, a plethora of contradiction, be it in the materials, the imagery, the themes, the tone. There’s pleasure in making, in exploring materials, in mixing a colour which you then spread on a surface, unsure of where it should go, how it’ll behave, painting in a wrong, non-academic way, not searching for a conclusion or a culmination of a process, but rather just enjoying that specific moment in time. 

I enjoy the way my body moves to allow the brush to meet the fabric, to allow texture to show through, to dictate where paint should go, knowing that this direction, this path, isn’t final, but rather just one of many possibilities.

Inês Miguel Oliveira, 2022

Inês Miguel Oliveira’s bold strokes, enlivened colors, and unbridled figures display a sense of corporal compulsion and exposure, the sheer experience of the kinetic impulses of our bodies and their interactions. Her interest in spontaneous movement—the unpredictable and imperfect expressions of the body—relates to her approach of unpretentious sincerity. Robert Frost wrote in his notebook: “There is such a thing as sincerity. It is hard to define but it is probably nothing more than your highest liveliness escaping from a succession of dead selves. Miraculously.” The artist’s playful hues, superimposed textures, and bursts of movement seem to be in conversation with Frost’s idea of sincerity, a visceral experience of the renewed self. In “movimento de braço, alongamento de perna” (“arm movement, leg stretch”) for instance, detached arms reach through sweeps of color, embracing the air. The tongue of an animal figure—or a human on all fours, if one uses the imagination—begins deep in the throat and is thrusted into the air, showing the connections between the air and our bodies. The body takes up space, it desires, it expands outwards.

Oliveira also invites us to imagine the body’s vulnerability and states of surrender. Her piece “Birth and Other Disappointments” suggests that our physical experiences can be tender and brutal, that our bodies will disappoint us. The image, painted in oil on raw primed fabric, shows what appears to be a woman’s amniotic sac breaking, while a faceless figure seems to wander a hill in the distance, perhaps a suggestion of a former or detached self.

Tapping into both the ecstasy and strangeness of the corporal experience, Oliveira is unafraid of an off-kilter reality; a tree bent sideways by the wind, the mysterious world of animals, the gravity of pregnancy. Even her choice to paint on fabric embraces an uncontrolled condition, eschewing formal notions of the “pristineness”, as she says, of fine art. Like the elements, both her medium and imagery is rebellious and unpredictable. She seems to make us question: what curious gestures, what intimacies, what oddities are at work in our everyday lives?

- The Editors

Inês Miguel Oliveira (Santa Eufémia de Prazins, Portugal) is an artist currently based in London, UK.

She holds a BFA in Fine Art – Painting from the Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Porto, complemented by a MA in Communication and Art in FCSH, Nova University of Lisbon.

Since then, Inês has been painting, producing work that deals with intimacy and the poetry of the daily, mundane living. Bus stop conversations, found objects in the garden, rubbish and desires make an appearance in her work, holding equal importance.

She’s been showing her work since 2016, in exhibitions such as “Espinho International Art Biennial” (Museu Municipal de Espinho, Portugal), “Shame Shouldn’t Be a Symptom” (Improper Walls, Vienna, Austria), “Distanced Domestic” (Co-Curation, London, UK), “Endless Summer” (Gallery for Sustainable Art, Berlin, Germany) and “Custard Cowboy” (Liquid Gold Studios, London, UK).

In 2019, she won the second place award at the Glyndebourne Tour Art Competition in Lewes, UK.

In 2022, Inês held her first solo exhibition, “Swimming with Whales”, at Liquid Gold Studios in London, UK, where she is also a resident artist.