NINETIES BERLIN
by Nuno Faria

The 1990s, in Europe synonymous with Berlin, were lived (sipped) under the sign(s) of liberation and experimentation. A unique, wild decade in which innocent bodies allowed themselves all kinds of experiences.
Less wall, more body, it was demanded. The fall (of the wall) was more than the fall (of a wall), it was the gathering of desiring bodies (even of themselves), scalding hot, melting like metal – it was the founding of a place of exception, the emergence of a new Europe. That’s why Berlin became the symbol city of the arts in which the body was a lingua franca, a common language – the place where everyone could be a hero for just one day (or one white night).
The Berlin of spherical timbre and inexhaustible energy, of repetitive rhythmic structures, of tribal rituals, dance, ecstasy and trance, abstraction, a place in tune with something transcendent.
It is to this Berlin, to this time and place, that Sobral Centeno’s paintings transport me. A whole history in a loop: reminiscent of his early paintings, reminiscent of the time he spent in Berlin, reminiscent of (German) romanticism and expressionism, in turn reminiscent of primitivism, these paintings recover the rhythmic intensity and savage gesture.
A figuration in a free association of ideas – faces, crosses, words, color – on a surface where black merges with the white of the canvas as the night glued to the day and so on, as if time were not a form of measurement, a bureaucracy, but a ritual, a marking, a cadence. They are, in short, new and brilliant paintings that open up a time to revisit and rediscover the extensive work of the Porto-born artist.