Clear lines
Cristina Sampaio's clear lines have come a long way. It begins with graphite and ink lines in comics and union newspaper strips, then passes through the twenty children's books that accompany the transformation of her gouaches in Digital Illustrator, until settling on the inexhaustible vein of political commentary that guides her professional work these days. Resident illustrator of the Público newspaper since its founding, and a long-time contributor to the weeklies Expresso, O Independente, the French Alternatives Économiques, and the Austrian Kleine Zeitung, Cristina Sampaio (Lisbon, 1960) already has a solid career spanning four decades dedicated to humorous drawing. Make no mistake: the clear line of digital purity is quite black and adept at delving into the analog and contradictory human nature. It's the line of a polygraph trained to catch the liars, the sly, and the stupid of the entire planet; it's a mirror of kindly colours that reflects our smile, deeply yellow. It's a line without master or disciple, a rare avis of Portuguese and international comic drawing, as simple in appearance as it is in depth and sophisticated in architecture, a fluid line that follows rigorous geometries and disorganizes into kilometer-long noses and tentacular arms that end in four economical fingers. Circus contortionists, Cristina's drawings are not constrained by the laws of anatomy or perspective, and their anamorphism lacks neither realism nor words.