> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.catapult-platform.art/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Margarida Fleming: The Art of Silent Tension - URL: https://www.catapult-platform.art/margarida-fleming-the-art-of-silent-tension/ - Published: 2025-06-24T07:29:32.000Z - Updated: 2026-01-18T11:29:58.000Z - Description: Discover the intimate, psychologically charged paintings of Margarida Fleming, a Lisbon based artist whose expressive portraits transform bodies into landscapes and light into emotion. Her work explores female presence, silence, and the quiet tension of being seen. - Author: Dominique Catherina Foertig - Tags: Featured ## *Bodies as Landscapes. Faces as Codes. Paintings that do not describe, but watch.* [**Margarida Fleming’s paintings**](https://margaridafleming.com/?ref=catapult-platform.art) don’t explain. They linger. They arrive in silence, already charged with meaning, already halfway inside your gaze. Her world is one of held breaths, glancing light, and figures who appear mid-thought, unwilling to pose, unable to lie. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/1c/24/1c2478ff-417d-4e88-8226-288af467f6b9/content/images/2025/06/portugal-new-artists-.webp) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/1c/24/1c2478ff-417d-4e88-8226-288af467f6b9/content/images/2025/06/artist-to-watch-1.webp) ****Margarida Fleming:** ****The Earth Skin (Detail)** 90x70 cm Mixed media on canvas "The body melts into the landscape, neither flesh nor earth, but something in between - a quiet pulse echoing through the currents. Gold flickers like forgotten dreams, dissolving into the silence. Where does the body end, and the world begin?"**.* \- ***Dreams and Flowers** 40x35 cm ("She listens with closed eyes to what only the flowers know how to say.") **In Fleming’s world, introspection is leafy, tactile, and gently surreal — like listening to someone dream through a wall of leaves.* \- Image courtesy of the artist - Published with permission ![margarida fleming, exhibiton](https://storage.ghost.io/c/1c/24/1c2478ff-417d-4e88-8226-288af467f6b9/content/images/2025/06/best-figurative-painter-now.webp) Margarida Fleming : ****Aurora (Solo-Show) – Garagem Lisboa, Lisbon** In **Aurora*, Margarida Fleming’s portraits occupied space with quiet force—faces suspended between intimacy and distance, light and shadow, presence and pauseImage courtesy of the artist - Published with permission Image by @henry.c.guilherme In her recent body of work, as seen in the exhibition *Connecting...* and now featured by **Munchies Art Club**, Fleming continues her quiet revolution: a portraiture stripped of spectacle, built instead from atmosphere, posture, and the subtle choreography of emotion. --- Become a Supporter Independent art writing. All free. Support if you can. [Learn more ](https://buy.stripe.com/3cI28rgHe8eE5LK6eccAo0h?ref=catapult-platform.art) --- ## **A Glimpse into the Works** **Disconnected Presence** offers one of the most striking entries into Fleming’s world. A woman stares into a phone, oblivious to the other figure beside her, whose presence feels more like a memory than a person. ![margarida fleming, painting](https://storage.ghost.io/c/1c/24/1c2478ff-417d-4e88-8226-288af467f6b9/content/images/2025/06/margarida-fleming--artwork.webp) Margarida Fleming: Disconnected Presence\_150x130 mixed media on canvas Image courtesy of the artist - Published with permission A sardine tin and cigarette-strewn ashtray ground the moment in the mundane, but the palette—muted oranges, exhausted blues, bruised greens - elevates the scene into metaphor. This isn’t just about attention. It’s about *absence* dressed as routine. **Light Me Gently**, in contrast, pushes close, almost uncomfortably. Two faces flicker in and out of view, lit only by the flare of a cigarette. Their proximity suggests intimacy, but their expressions remain unreadable. ![Small-format painting by Portuguese artist Margarida Fleming, photographed in her Lisbon studio—an atmospheric close-up of dual female presence rendered in warm, expressionist tones.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/1c/24/1c2478ff-417d-4e88-8226-288af467f6b9/content/images/2025/06/new-painters-from-portugal.webp) Detail: ****Light Me Gently, 2024** Acrylic & oil pastel on canvas Image courtesy of the artist - Published with permission What burns here is not the flame, but the emotional opacity, the sense that something is being exchanged just outside the viewer’s grasp. In **Mountain of Light and Shadow**, Fleming’s figures begin to dissolve into their environment. The female form is no longer distinct from the landscape: It *is* the landscape. ![margarida fleming](https://storage.ghost.io/c/1c/24/1c2478ff-417d-4e88-8226-288af467f6b9/content/images/2025/06/Montain-of-light-and-shadow_mixmediaoncanvas_130x110.webp) Mountain of light and shadow mixed media on canvas 130x110 - Image courtesy of the artist - Published with permission Light dapples the shoulders like camouflage, the body becomes terrain. We begin to wonder are these women being seen, or are they actively hiding? **Ordinary Day** anchors us back in the studio. A figure sits at a table, hand resting beside two round fruits and a phone. Her posture is open but her gaze is elsewhere. As in much of Fleming’s work, there is no action, only atmosphere. No declaration, only presence. What appears quiet is, in fact, saturated with tension. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/1c/24/1c2478ff-417d-4e88-8226-288af467f6b9/content/images/2025/06/artist-studio-1.webp) ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/1c/24/1c2478ff-417d-4e88-8226-288af467f6b9/content/images/2025/06/painter-paints.webp) Margarida Fleming - Studio - ****Ordinary Day, 2024** Image courtesy of the artist - Published with permission ![margarida fleming, artwork](https://storage.ghost.io/c/1c/24/1c2478ff-417d-4e88-8226-288af467f6b9/content/images/2025/06/new-female-artists.webp) Margarida Fleming - Studio - ****Ordinary Day, 2024** A quiet portrait turns contemplative in the artist’s Lisbon studio—where posture, color, and stillness meet under painterly precision.Image courtesy of the artist - Published with permission --- ## **Light, Shadow, and the Shape of Thought** Light touches the body like weather touches land, gently and then suddenly. In Margarida Fleming’s paintings, human figures unfold like topographies of thought. A collarbone becomes a ridge, a cheekbone a hidden refuge. Her shadows don’t just define form, they hold memory. ![Close-up of a female portrait by Portuguese artist Margarida Fleming, captured in her Lisbon studio with natural sunlight revealing layered textures of acrylic and oil pastel on canvas.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/1c/24/1c2478ff-417d-4e88-8226-288af467f6b9/content/images/2025/06/new-painter-from-portugal.webp) ****Margarida Fleming: Echoes (Detail)** 65x65cm CONNECTING... Exhibition Lisbon, **2024** Sunlight brushes across the painted surface, catching on pastel textures and soft shadows—turning skin into reflection, and stillness into presence. This use of light whether natural, digital, or imagined becomes central to how we read her paintings. A phone screen, the shade of a tree, the glint of a windowpane these aren’t just technical exercises they are emotional codes. The figures do not sit in light, they *interact* with it. Sometimes resisting it. Sometimes dissolving into it. --- ## **Painting the Intangible** What makes Margarida Fleming’s work so captivating is not what she paints, but how she *withholds*. Her brushwork is thick, sometimes erratic, as if pulling emotion through the surface. ![On the studio wall in Lisbon: an intimate moment flickers between two figures, captured in half-light and emotional proximity.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/1c/24/1c2478ff-417d-4e88-8226-288af467f6b9/content/images/2025/06/Light-me-Gently_.webp) ****Light Me Gently, 2024 (Studio View) by Margarida Fleming** Acrylic & oil pastel on canvas - Published with permission Her women are not icons or muses, they are beings caught mid-thought, defined less by appearance than by the space they occupy. Shaped by her background in architecture, Fleming’s compositions have a structural clarity. Yet, they resist resolution. Light becomes a recurring character flickering off skin, bouncing through windows, bending around emotion. ![Expressionist painting by Lisbon-based artist Margarida Fleming, Dreams and Flowers, blending female portraiture with abstract light and organic forms on canva](https://storage.ghost.io/c/1c/24/1c2478ff-417d-4e88-8226-288af467f6b9/content/images/2025/06/catapult-artist-.webp) ****Earth Skin** 90x70cm****, 2024 ( Studio Margarida Fleming)** A body dissolves into light and shadow—memory blooming through painterly fragments. courtesy of the artist - Published with permission Whether it's the glow of a phone screen or the shadows of foliage across a face, light in Fleming’s world is always ambiguous both revealing and concealing at once. Her exploration of presence, especially the female body as presence is never symbolic or decorative. These are not illustrations of femininity. These are confrontations with it. Through gesture, color, and silence, she paints not *about* women, but with them, through them. --- ## **From Lisbon to Now: A Painter of Intimate Resistance** Based in Lisbon and originally from São Pedro do Sul, Margarida Fleming is a self-taught artist with a background in architecture and design. ![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/1c/24/1c2478ff-417d-4e88-8226-288af467f6b9/content/images/2025/06/maria-fleming-artist.webp) ****Detail from** ***Daydream Picnic** **, 2024, 130 × 110 cm, Acrylic & Oil pastel on canvas by Margarida Fleming** In this close-up, Margarida Fleming’s layered brushwork and soft pastel textures reveal the subtle emotional charge of the scene. Light and shadow blur into each other, as if memory and presence were dissolving in real time. Even in a fragment, the atmosphere is complete.Image courtesy of the artist - Published with permission Her work unfolds across the canvas in psychological fragments, emotional light, and painterly weight. She creates not just images, but presence. [Margarida Fleming![](https://static.ghost.org/v5.0.0/images/link-icon.svg)![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/1c/24/1c2478ff-417d-4e88-8226-288af467f6b9/content/images/thumbnail/Montain-of-light-and-shadow_lr_1-1.webp)](https://margaridafleming.com/?ref=catapult-platform.art) Margarida Fleming - official Website In a time of overstimulation and image fatigue, Fleming offers something rare: stillness that speaks. Not loudly. But truthfully. --- **All images courtesy of the artist** [**Margarida Fleming**](https://margaridafleming.com/?ref=catapult-platform.art)**.** **Published with permission.** **Follow** [**Margarida Fleming on Instagram**](https://www.instagram.com/margarida%5Ffleming/?ref=catapult-platform.art) --- Become a Supporter or Patron This is independent art writing - no paywall, no ads, no bullshit. ****If you value this voice, support it.** [Learn more about Membership ](https://www.catapult-platform.art/join/) [Can Artists Be Replaced? Dancing with Machines in the Age of AILet the tool make pictures. Artists make meaning. That’s non-replaceable.![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/1c/24/1c2478ff-417d-4e88-8226-288af467f6b9/content/images/icon/munchies-art-club-magazine-589.png)Catapult - The New Munchies Art Club | Critical CuratorsDominique Catherina Foertig![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/1c/24/1c2478ff-417d-4e88-8226-288af467f6b9/content/images/thumbnail/image-8.gif)](https://www.catapult-platform.art/can-artists-be-replaced/) catapult - uncensored --- ## Related Artists: [David Rosado: A Interview of Contemporary ExplorationDiscover the art of David Rosado in our exclusive feature. Explore his blend of street art and modern expressions that challenge and captivate. 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