“I know excellent artists who give a lot to engraving but don’t give it everything. There are in them as reserved areas that engraving doesn’t force or to which it doesn’t respond; it won’t be so because the demands that the engraving asks for follow, but, mainly, because in certain circumstances only the alteration of the expression opens such reserved worlds and breaks the spaces for invention. There are other artists, few that I also know, where the engraving has access to all the greatness of soul. What there is to do and show of oneself is only in that piece of stone, very polished, marbled and, in its own way, soft; in the metal plate that the buris retract and the tongues of fire of the jaws corrode until the perforation; in the piece of wood, shredded, veins in sight like nerves and blood. For such artists it is in these materials of much and ancient workshop nobility that the creation is engendered and vasa. Then, the paper goes to fetch from them what remains of it; in that veronica without a cross, but very mysterious and sacred in the always repeated and at the same time unknown surprise: the desired apparition. ILDA REIS is one of those few artists. Since I’ve known her, admired her and been friends with her, an engraving of hers has never failed to show me the depth of these soul marks. None has ever ceased to have that commitment that externalizes and internalizes that incontestable force that is, on the one hand, the effort and the way of the arm, exactly, it is, on the other hand, the force of the spirit that is another even greater force. There is no art of engraving possible without the concert of these two forces of which the paper, the proof, does not always witness the recognizable dimension. This aspect, this kind of face of the work, is recognized and reflected in the engravings of ILDA REIS almost as if the morphology that distinguishes them from the others were determined by it. (…) A great balance is made of the work from its beginning so that it is possible, feasible or even desirable to see where it begins what now seems to change. And, if so, after the great fire and the black gray it is always reborn, in the tradition of myth, something, something is announced, then”. Fernando Azevedo

CV