Regina da Costa Val portrays in people what is most sensitive in them: their soul, in the phantasmagoria of deformed bodies we defront with what we would like to ignore – the reality of human hunger and penury.

The woman with the sagging breasts, naked, cries in wide grin as if in a mockery of the reality of the empty plate. The plate that seeks food is the same that offers (or snows) the reality.

There is a profound mystery in the faces of these deformed beings, as if they were the possessors, the keepers of the secret of survival in that sub-human situation. As if the artist’s sensitive eyes could capture and transmit to us, as if in a snapshot, those who live at the margin of life.

Very often a composition brings to the mind a photographic cut. We can observe, in those depicting a soccer math, the movement and the physical vigour represented by the players seen at a distance from a window, and the body of the observer, all tension and participation in a show that he watches from the outside.

Again, imperiously, there is the presence of those "at the margin", unable of taking part in the play. In the play of life. It is the denouncement of the condition of millions of people that are reduced to this almost-nothing that, with her artistic power, Regina lays bare, forcing us to reflection.

It is a conscious but not submissive acceptance of human misery in its most profound implications.

It is a painting the goes beyond the plastic. It is a punch on the face.

ELIANA MOURÃO

Writer and Painter