Artista AMISSAO LIMA

Biography:
Amissão Lima was born on 1958 in Calequisse, Guinea Bissau and apart of the traditions of his people, carries along the cultural remainings of the portughese domination, evident also on his name and surname.
He is a very precocious artist, plasters the clay stolen from the termites nests and models little dolls that are something between a forest spirit and friends portraits; later on he reproduces virgins in the missionary school that he starts to attend. During the first half of the 70’s he makes sculptures in diverse materials, being inspired by pictures of beaten warriors who fought for the freedom of the nation. He later attends high school and the Arts and crafts school where he meets the portughese painter Augusto Trigo who, apart of the advices, gives Amissao some oil colors that will contribute for his evolution from sculptor to painter.
After a short period in Lisbon, Amissão comes to Italy and attends to the Accademia di Belle Arti of Ravenna under the guidance of Umberto Folli. It is since then that he starts his artistic carrier. His painting is enriched with important technical and plastic contents, the color fades and becomes more refined and meditated. The artist approaches his master's ways without fully merging with them. In the works of that period there persists narrative references and archaic representations that cannot merge without damage in the compositional schematism and almost ascetic tonality of Folli’s creed...//

...//The evident need to disengage from these residues in order to undertake a more modern and personal path, forced the artist to leave the realistic representation of the object, radically transforming the approach to it. The process, difficult and not without suffering, has lead the artist to a radical expressionist move that has simplified and enhanced the represented image.
In the last decade, even if ranging between synthesis and formal abstraction, his painting has achieved excellent levels of personal quality that make it language that can be clearly intuited, of considerable artistic depth and sharp interpretive sensibility.
Amissão Lima, beyond the subjects portraying those colors with crumbled hues, mixed with the ocher dust of his native village, produces forms that seem to be worn by the only effort of being represented, inducing a sense of calm and insoluble melancholy.
It’s a painter of the time, of that rough strip along which, together with our life, everything is consumed. Of that time that nothing can withstand, not even our memory that is always hopelessly and affectionately betrayed.
Carlo Polgrossi.