TERESA DIAS COELHO

Lisbon, Portugal, 1954

GALERIA MONUMENTAL

“It is always like that, in all Teresa Dias Coelho’s work: her paintings always seem so attached to a figurative evidence that they offer some resistance to the passage to another level of elaboration that apprehends the ghosts that are hidden in them. And we can well say that they are full of ghosts.” (António Guerreiro, 2017).
If her work is marked by what a Portuguese poet summed up as a Time of Ghosts, these ghosts can be from individuals, family stories, which we only access through details given to us – the feet, the shoes, the positions and the assumptions they raise – as from anonymous collectives of those same days: portraits of paralysis or fight. If in her painting the “figurative evidence” seems to hide these ghosts to some extent, it is in the drawing that they gain greater density, like a siren or an alert in the fog of memory. Turn Again, the series to which these drawings belong, can be read in this way – the resistance and persistence of the drawing.