What is the landscape? Manuel Valente Alves chose, for the title of his exhibition, Stimmung - The feeling of the landscape. It was not by chance that he opted for a German word, in an allusion to German Romanticism, which, not only means feeling, but humor, state of mind. He added the genitive “of the landscape”, as if it were an organism that had feelings, passions, desires, and despondency. Or its opposite, which is not entirely exclusive to the first premise. Is the landscape a feeling? Can I identify this feeling, this reaction, which is also physiological, when I contemplate or summon the landscape? (…)
In this exhibition, Manuel Valente Alves decomposes landscape painting into its various elements. We find rocks, water, clouds and fields. We even find, somewhere, something that resembles a ruin, one of the almost inevitable props of the romantic landscape, supporting a melancholy meditation on decadence and death. In other centers, there is a place for cultural elements that made it possible to operate the transformation of the scenario into a main subject: the column, made in the image of the tree trunk, the human figure, measured from the entire space, the constructed elements, support of the entire representation linear perspective. Farther away, already in photography, the birds, the sea, still the human figure and finally the horizon line.
And because all he shows us is painting, photography and even film, what really reveals to us is that the landscape does not, in fact, exist outside of me. In that sense, I feel it. Manuel Valente Alves mentions the landscape, never presenting or representing it. And even the film he chose to be part of this exhibition, a montage of plans taken on the beaches of the Sintra-Cascais Natural Park, is not really about landscapes, but evocations of landscapes already seen, already shown, a feeling that lasts when it is no longer it is possible to reinvent this genre. And not even the children who play, or the knights who snail in the surf, can convince us of anything else. And here, as in Venice, it is the memory of painting that allows me to see the landscape. ”
Luísa Soares de Oliveira, “The image of the landscape”, in: Catalog of the exhibition Stimmung: The Feeling of the Landscape, Cascais Cultural Center, Cascais, 2021