Miguel Barros
One can be sceptic of art’s potential to bring actual changes. However, its influence is subtle, making us more aware of specific issues, such as our impact on water resources. For instance, Miguel Barros turned his painting into an instrument of spreading ecological awareness
The featured series of works by Miguel presents a formal exploration of colour, texture, and composition, unified through a palette dominated by blues, violets, and deep blacks, occasionally punctuated with warm ochres and reds. All the works are created with mixed media, including oil paint, recycled plastics, paper, textiles, canvas scraps, and found objects. The author merges the fragments into organic, flowing forms—repurposing materials that might otherwise become waste. This technique reflects both the natural cycles of transformation and a personal commitment to sustainability.
The artist employs a mosaic-like assemblage technique, layering fragments of recycled materials to create dynamic, abstract forms that evoke icebergs, underwater currents, and marine topographies. The interplay of light and dark, as well as opacity and translucency, generates spatial depth and tension, while the tactile surfaces—achieved through mixed media collage—invite closer inspection. Overall, these works function as both aesthetic compositions and environmental meditations, fusing formal abstraction with ecological symbolism.
A recurrent visual element of Miguel’s pieces is their grid-like structure. The artist subtly engages with the principles of the modernist grid while simultaneously reinterpreting and subverting them. The modernist grid—championed by artists like Piet Mondrian and later formalized by Rosalind Krauss as a symbol of autonomy, order, and the flatness of modern art—embodied the ideas of rational structure, repetition, and a detachment from the natural world. Miguel’s representations of actual marine forms introduce a sense of organic movement and entropy, contrasting with the grid’s traditional associations with control, stability, and flatness.
By integrating themes of ecological fragility and environmental decay, the painter transforms grid into a dynamic field of rupture and renewal—where nature’s fluid unpredictability visibly undoes the human impulse to structure. In doing so, his work reinterprets the modernist grid as a space not of rational purity, but of poetic disintegration, making it relevant to contemporary ecological and aesthetic concerns.
Miguel Barros, born in Lisbon in 1962, is a painter whose life and career span multiple continents and cultures. Holding citizenship from Portugal, Angola, and Canada, Barros embodies a transnational identity that informs much of his creative work. After spending a significant period of his life in Luanda, the capital city of Angola, he eventually relocated to Calgary, Canada, where he currently resides and continues his artistic practice. His academic background is rooted in design and the built environment—he earned a degree in Architecture and Interior Design from IADE in Lisbon, completing his studies in 1984. Since then, Barros has shifted his focus entirely to the visual arts. His art is held in over 20 countries, namely Portugal, Angola, Canada, Brazil, Japan, and South Africa.
Miguel Barros is the Bronze Artist of the ArtAscent Water call for artists. To see the full body of work and profile, get a copy of the 2025 ArtAscent Art & Literature Journal Water issue.
