Maps are built through
an ostension with several dimensions.
— Fernando Gil

“Dives of Rebirth: the Great Union of Schools” celebrates life through everything that exalts it—and through that which makes this exaltation possible: exchange, as conceptualized by Lévi-Strauss. And thus, exogamy, which in this case unfolds in diaspora.
Here, a dynamic interplay between identity and otherness is evident. Identity can only be understood through an eccentric vision, stripped of all myopia. The being, realized in the existent, sets in motion a movement toward the other—whether literally, or from Portugal to the world, and in this work, between Portugal and France—without forgetting the source from which these countries drank the Atlas of values, cartographically expressed by Mário Vitória in exuberant colors, foreshadowing the very definition of forms in their becoming. These colors, crafted to scale, guide readability through either sharp or floating contrasts, revealing a metonymic harmony between detail and totality.

The images—whether overt or revealing the miniature artistry of Francisco de Holanda or his father, António de Holanda—become paths of confluences that later disperse. One could say that time unravels small stretches of silence between the vortices that pull the scene toward one of the stage’s centers, or into the vertical movement of transcendence clothed in the colors of immanence.
The cartographer makes of the work itself—“Dives of Rebirth: the Great Union of Schools”—a victory of vision over the unknown, bringing into presence the great symbols of each culture and the narrow passages that nourish them. It is also a quest that, drawing from the great age of the Renaissance and the meaning of the word itself, aims at a new birth. Against chaos, stagnation, and illiteracy, the work calls for the values of the Renaissance to be updated within the same liberty (figured by Marianne, in Delacroix’s version), in equality and fraternity—symbols imprinted on the flag and heart of France.
The equality of merit and dignity between Olympic and Paralympic champions is here sublimely expressed in the sculptural elegance of each athlete’s movement. Consider the imagistic poetry of the athlete who touches the water with his marine foot and dives into the air with his wing-arm, or the wheelchair crowned with every victory.

The solidarity of the school of swimmers reveals itself as a new fraternal enchantment weaving chains of feeling—above and below the waters—that bathe our moving emotions on the path to Love, the great lesson from the pen of Camões. In Sá de Miranda and the Portuguese Renaissance more broadly, the word “enchantment” bore a pejorative bent, tied to false images that lead to entrapment. The enchantment by Circe and the Sirens are original examples of this idea, which in Antiquity takes major form in the Odyssey. But enchantment also has another face—of altruism or of seduction without deceit: the seduction awaiting us in the vibrant Paris of 2024, like the baristic imagery of the city given by Apollinaire through the bubbling gas of the autoselz, sparkling in the night. The same effervescent lights that illuminate the migrants who, in turn, illuminate the Olympic journey toward the blue mountain.

We too, spectators of an “open work,” are called upon to move from one face of the piece to another, wherever the seas may take us, standing on a plinth that receives the overflow of creation: the books that un-limit us. We contemplate the pictorial work with the displacement demanded by a sculpture en ronde bosse, with the movement celebrated—and required—by sport.

The predominance of blue in form and background signifies, simultaneously, so much and everything beyond. If we know that this work by Mário Vitória is dedicated to the Swimming modality of the Paris 2024 Olympic Games, the blue element integrates its symbol. On the French face, entitled “Cardumes” (Schools of Fish), blue is imperturbable and shines in the colors of Notre-Dame’s stained glass, desaturating into a ground of Monet’s water lilies. The image of the cathedral is the vertical element structuring this French side of the work—a more rationally modeled side, where the figures of the side aisles rise and those of the central nave descend or remain suspended, like the angels in Wim Wenders’s Wings of Desire, or the trapeze artist in the same film, played by Solveig Dommartin.

And in Blue—the first film in Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Three Colors Trilogy—the liquid element is primordial, since it is about Liberty. And I ask: what color is the horizon, what color is the sea? The images of Juliette Binoche swimming to purge emotions she refuses to express are powerful, right up to the moment when her head and back rise at the edge of the pool and dive back in—because each stroke calls forth another, and water is never enough to quench thirst. The vigorous motion holds something sublime in the perfect persistence of its rhythm.

In this work by Mário Vitória, the figures woven on diagonals give us a dynamic of forces that burst the presumed space. The Discoveries, as a force for knowledge, break through limitations with powerful strokes, pushing beyond the possible.

Each face of the canvas exuberantly reveals well-referenced residues of a Portuguese world map in France and a diasporic French map with emanations in Portugal—foundations of roads, of Portuguese buildings and their carefully adorned interiors. We exported this pride in our homes, in the stairs that rise only to plunge back to the ground, in the freshly laundered scent inherited from washing stones and rivers, whenever we blushed in the sun against the disdain for our labor as conquerors of daily life.
When I was a child, at the border and beyond it, Portugal was Eusébio and Amália—and for some, Fernando Pessoa. The others, all of us visiting Paris or any France, were temporary or long-term emigrants. We were arms and legs in movement and weight. Detergent was the idea of our perfume bowed toward the floor.

But we were—and are—intoxicated by architecture, the arts, literature, the scent of dustless streets; by all that transmutes into Light in this city that illuminated our hunger for art, culture, civilization, art de la table, and that savoir-faire that delighted the Delaunays when a Portuguese man knocked on their gate, announcing himself as the Portuguese painter Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso.
His greyhounds do not escape Mário Vitória. Here are the greyhounds, as if ready to leap, poised at the very impulse that begins the swimming game.

And on this Portuguese face of the ronde bosse sculpture, the symbols point to a greater figure: Alberto Caeiro, Fernando Pessoa’s master, from whom the work evokes the image of the poem “The Keeper of Sheep”—we being the keepers of the scattered books, reaching toward the unbounded edge of this sculpture, conceived pictorially.

On this face entitled “Between Water, Carnations, and Roses” there are far fewer architectural references, but everything is a symbol. Indeed, the symbols themselves migrate in this participatory game, in the manner of Lévi-Bruhl, between Portugal and France. The conch, displayed on the French face, is, according to Mário Vitória, an allusion to a portugalidade in which the god Hermes (from Michel Serres) and the cosmos communicate and interact in a whisper. However, on this Portuguese side, where nothing is fixed but everything moves, the figures symbolize modern and eternal values—such as Queen Amélia, Queen Saint Isabel, or Father António Vieira.
We are led to culture as initiation, through literature and painting—and through sport.

If Victor Hugo considers architecture to be humanity’s great book—revealing how each people, in each era, understands and symbolizes the world—then Mário Vitória rewrites Franco-Portuguese architecture, emphasizing the Portuguese expansion by sea and the incursions into France through symbols representing both nations and the generative exchanges of cultural and intellectual transformation.

In this pictorial alphabet, each letter of stone is a menhir: the horses signifying strength, the rhinoceros, the whales, the tree, and also the faces of Amália, Pierre de Coubertin, Camões, Diderot, Prince Henry the Navigator, Foucault, Pessoa, Suzana Barros, Victor Hugo and many more.
And within each image cast into the canvas’s infinity rest clusters of ideas, vowel syllables that join to form the ship, the astrolabe, the hot air balloon, and other instruments. Imagination and the thirst for knowledge demanded more complexity—and entire interconnected phrases were formed to exalt meaning: the republican ideal, embodied in each face of the work, in the faces of the women who represent it. But also the Abbey of Fontenay, the Eiffel Tower, the cathedral of Notre Dame require vast phrases that interlace to envision the book.
The athletes are words that, together in the Olympic ideal, also rise as a cathedral. Reflected in the element of water, the cathedral sways harmoniously, as the sculptural schools of fish swim through the blue, toward the becoming of Humanity.

This is how Mário Vitória integrates tradition and contemporaneity in a single movement of our spirit toward a greater good.
May this be the horizon of becoming!

Rosa Alice Branco (critical commentary on the artwork Dives of Renaissance: the Great Union of Shoals)

Rosa Alice Branco, June 2025