Pinturas Cantadas
Daniel V. Melim developed during his artist residency in Castro Daire an iteration of his long-term project “Pinturas cantadas”, which brings together three strands of the work he has been developing for the last 15 years (to date): visual arts, performance / music and I work with people. The aim was to create a performance from informal meetings with the local population, through conversations with community members about the positive things and problems in their lives, and also about local stories. The artist collected objects like furniture or old clothes and painted over them. The paintings stayed in line with his painting work: a mix of strongly realistic bent and model-based images with an overall sense of fragility/strangeness in their material presence. These painted objects are the scenery, props and score for the performance, in which Daniel V. Melim sings the paintings.
Daniel V. Melim was born in 1982, living and working in Lisbon. The artist is interested in the affective, historical, collective, ecological, spiritual and healing dimensions of creation, dividing his time between his author’s work (plastic arts, music) and his work with people. He has an academic background in Fine Arts-Painting from the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Lisbon (2006) and an MA Applied Anthropology and Community and Youth Work from Goldsmiths College-University of London (2016). He was a finalist in the 2007 EDP Novos Artistas Award, winner of the Fidelidade Mundial Jovens Pintores Award in 2011 and shortlisted in the world project 100 Painters of Tomorrow (Thames & Hudson, 2014), having developed artistic projects in Portugal, Spain, Brazil, Germany and the United Kingdom