At the Portuguese Screen Printing Center in Lisbon (Rua dos Industriais, no. 6) there will be Open from December 13th to January 18th, 2009, an anthological exhibition of Espiga's graphic work summarizing around 50 years of his work, including linoleums, woodcuts, lithographs and silkscreens on paper and on fabric. From the realism of his beginnings, the artist evolved into a poetic symbolism whose main protagonists are the horse, a solar and cosmic symbol, the plethora and telleric bull, the woman in sweetness of the musical variations of the feminine and a nature that is complicit in the beauty of this universe that is ours today. given to appreciate in the luminous splendor of its metamorphoses. About Espiga's work, writes Rocha de Sousa, professor and painter at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Lisbon: “Espiga’s restlessness and experimental changes have translated, in its last phases, that need research into the genesis of the world, always reinventing itself. The distant, graphic, emblematic iconography gave up the wheel (or the circle) to a kind of reflection on organisms with a cosmic connotation. There are There is still a certain ornamentality in the immense cartographies inscribed in the circular arcs of geometry, or this round, two-dimensional idea, which seems to integrate, in ring planes, some marks of the first religiosity, later symbols, the annunciation of Man to the world. searching for your place in the Universe. The author explores the shape of natural shells, lost molluscs, in order to highlight their radial structure, once again glued to the shell. image of the circle, spread shells, domes from when the Earth seemed flat, immobile, the constellations around. There were then figures in the sky, winged horses, doves with fanned wings, human hands as if turning the controls at their fingertips. its scale, made to measure; image and similarity of ancient and contemporary cosmologies. In their rigorous presence in black, stars or metallic spheres of all handles, they give the imagination an eternal will against its limits of human finitude, unveiling the secret geometry that connects cardinal points between galaxies, ultimately intangible places where only the mind, in a precarious way, can suggest (in the face of all the presences and absences) the idea of travel, migrations without return. From here, among obscure alchemies, results a kind of project appropriate to the world. transcendence that involves the man still hostage to mysticism, a poet sure that his pictorial verses can populate, among signs of the absolute, this indirect meditation on the mystery of our existence. meaning, in a thin stroke, by death.”