Madalena Leitão, “Pintura”

Madalena Leitão (1991, Lisbon) is a multifaceted artist whose practice moves between animation cinema and painting, deeply influenced by the artistic environment in which she grew up. From an early age, she absorbed the importance of freedom of creative expression. Trained in Animation and Film, much of her path has been shaped by self-teaching, intuitively exploring different techniques and materials.

After an initial phase dedicated to animation cinema, she stepped away from that world to travel, live new experiences, and discover what life was truly telling her. During an immersive period in the equestrian world, she worked as a horse portraitist at international competitions, reconnecting with drawing and deepening her sensitivity to movement, anatomy, and energy. In that process, she rediscovered the pleasure of capturing the essence of small things.

Her more recent transition to painting arose from her encounter with a technique as instinctive as oil, which emphasizes gesture and spontaneity. Her paintings are a synthesis of all her life experiences, memories, fragments, and familiar figures that take on a recurring presence in her work. The canvas functions as the other subject in a conversation that could be endless. Her almost unconscious approach, combined with a vibrant colour palette, results in work that balances between the figurative and the abstract, capturing emotions, atmospheres, and states of mind.

Mário Santiago