Duarte Vitoria's Art Analysis

2004 Words5 Pages

I chose to study Portugese artist Duarte Vitoria’s work because of his use of colour and variety of detail and brushstrokes. Vitoria generally paints huge expressive portraits of the female form. He works with oil on canvas and his use of colour is dramatic and distinct. His subjects portray a unique vulnerability and they seem to be very restricted in space, almost as if they are compressed within the frame. This restriction allows for the body to be painted in its wholeness, almost as if an exploration of a body ‘squeezed against a canvas’ – as on critic put it. The scale of his work magnifies the expressions of his subjects and highlights the distortions of their bodies. In some parts his technique can be found brutal and expressive, but …show more content…

His work is the result of an ongoing apprenticeship, and he has studied painters he has admired for years. Liepke paints sensual figurative oil paintings of women, in a different manner to those of Vitoria, in that his work is provocative and he models are beautiful. His subjects vary from innocent looking young women, to glamorously fashionable women. Many of the women he paints are nude and quite often wearing heavy makeup and statement jewellery. A lot of his subjects appear as if they were from the last century, almost in a 1920’s Parisian chic style. His work is very sensual and passionate, and we can see a huge appreciation of femininity and sexual freedom within his work. There is a huge engagement between the woman and the viewer, direct eye contact is constantly present in his work and we feel ask if we are being looked at by the art, rather than the other way around. The expressions on the women’s faces are very alluring and it is hard to break eye contact with his work. The viewer is almost trapped in an awkward gaze with the subjects, and even when just a portrait, we are given a feeling of sexualisation. The women themselves have stereotypically beautiful, slim figures, huge lustful eyes and pouted lips. They seem as if they are cover girls from magazines, perhaps aimed at men. His work is very personal and his use of colour and light, especially as highlights, make the women appear to be glistening, a style rather commonly used in provocative photo shoots. His work almost appears as if we have stumbled upon an intimate moment, one so overtly sexual, but without any sort of actual sexual connotation. His painting style adds to this massively, using soft and supple pinks and whites for skin tone and white highlights so add a shine to his model’s skin. He has produced a colossal amount of work, which has become exceedingly popular, and as one critic says, this is because ‘sex sells’. His

More about Duarte Vitoria's Art Analysis

Open Document