On what he knows of his daily life and of people who fill and live these days, Orlando Pompeu makes an ingenuous or naïve painting at a «N» involuntary degree. Were he an American and he would have been a «hyper-realistic» buí migration in the flesh or merely in the mind does not seduce him and the surroundings of Fafe are for our painter salvation enough. Thus, between the two poles of a sophisticated esthetic function, hair by hair, skin by skin, wrinkle by wrinkle and through the direct knowledge of such hairs, skins, wrinkles, woollen knitted socks and cleaned off lice, or of undernourished children's hanging dicks - Pompeu's art hás its necessary and sufficient choice. And an uncommon one.

l am not sure whether there are or there were in Portugal imitation hyper-realistics among this or that fashion whose possible average lifetime is one and a half year; l would never care for them. For Pompeu, however, l would; looking at his painting and listening to his explanations which come from the depths of his village, its people and things. Because he remembers, he looks at truth as the oíd Camilian squire, his fellow countrymen, used to, he who already knew it with a certainty that no fake town could ever shake...

The wrinkled hands painted by Pompeu, or the tanned strong necks, the unshaven faces, the children in tatters, have and will have years of work — for they come from far way and will never change enough in these worlds of poverty, fatality and resignation. Which the painter got used to for his experience was bom in there...

Pompeu practices, with a calm and friendly conviction, a pleasant and likeable art.

And if he were reinventing an invisible world in its daily, modest, stubborn evidence,

impertinent only in the last instance because no one was expecting it to be so, from

Fafe down —and even in Paris...

In Catálogo da Exposição «Horizonte de Liberdade» de Orlando Pompeu, na Fundação Eng. António de Almeida. Janeiro / Fevereiro de 1997