Personal Presentation

Assistant Professor in the Visual Arts Department at FBAUP, he is responsible for curricular units related to Painting (Studio, History and Theories of Painting, Composition), also involving components of drawing practices and studies; this corresponds to a training and professional activity, both teaching and artistic, consistently interested in these two areas.

He holds a Bachelor's degree in Fine Arts-Painting, a Master's degree in Drawing Practices and Theories - where he wrote a dissertation on the Drawing of Archaeological Materials - and a Doctorate in Art and Design - Painting Branch, where he conducted a study on Preliminary Forms of Still Life, which ultimately constitutes a kind of "archaeology" of this figurative archetype in Painting.

His professional career in teaching began at the Faculty of Architecture of the University of Porto, where he taught drawing for 14 years. Since 2019, he has taught Painting courses at FBAUP. He joined FBAUP as an Assistant Professor in 2025.

Simultaneously, since 2002, he has worked as a visual artist, holding multiple exhibitions, both solo and group. The resulting work manifests a recurring interest in figurative themes that express aspects and ideas of transformation, transience, ruin, fragmentation, time, absence, and memory, and in this sense interferes with the construction of identity. Paintings, drawings, but also photographs, frequently give us access to landscapes and spaces known to the author, as well as fragments of objects, occasionally collected in particular locations and in fleeting circumstances.

From early on, there has been an intertwining between artistic and research interests, which are reflected in some articles published in national and international journals. One of the latest expressions of this is in an article (entitled "Map in Ruins: Metaphor and Imaginative Appeal") developed from an ancient engraving of archaeological fragments, from which the metaphorical side, the symbolic pregnance, and the imaginative potential of fragments and ruins, but also of constructions, are explored.

The guidance of master's and doctoral projects carried out generally involves subjects or questions related to landscape or space, but also includes diverse aspects and themes that draw from procedures, practices, ideas, theories, concepts, and expressions of painting, and certain aspects of drawing.

Very recently, interests have focused on artistic formulations that express a conception of space as a mutable, relative entity, and, to that extent, prone to ambiguities; considering, namely: the experience of intercalary spaces and forms; the subjective perceptions of peripheries (an aspect based on particularities of the relationship between the individual and space);

(For more information about the author's work, please visit: luis-fortunato-lima3.webnode.pt)