Susa Monteiro

(Portuguese – 1979)

Postcards from no place – Susa Monteiro
July 2020

Susa Monteiro (Beja, 1979) has exclusively created these images for Tinta nos Nervos, where they are publicly presented in a short-term exhibition and then are part of our art for sale inventory. The author, who is a recurrent and celebrated name within the worlds of comics, children’s illustration, editorial and auteur illustration, carries seriously many of the Western traditions of conceptual image-making.


If one takes in account the way Susa Monteiro “translated” António Lobo Antunes’ chronicles in Visão magazine, or how she recreated her city of birth in the Pato Lógico map, in which it is less important the cartography of actual streets than the possibility of discovering new locales, or the way she creates a ghost of a story in her own Sonho(“Dream”, also published by Pato Lógico), one starts to understand, without ever reaching it completely, the elements that constitute the author’s graphic universe.


“Complete” is exactly what will never happen in her images, for they will always be open to the observer’s interpretative effort, the desire to enter them. These are not exactly enigmas, rebuses, or emblematarom Renaissance times. There are connections to Paul Delvaux’ brand of Surrealism, or De Chirico’s own pittura metafisica, but in which the characters come to the fore as vividly as they can, in tropical shades and colours, in a sort of arrogant coyness, if such an oxymoron is conceivable.


These 20 images, made of acrylic and gouache on watercolour paper, seem to have been created under the aegis of America, but a still mythical America, populated by made up characters from the fictions of literature and genre cinema. We’ll find cowboys and Indians, circus and rodeo shows by the side of roads, and stretches of these same roads, leading nowhere. But there’s also Roswell aliens and a veritable ménagerieof animals that seem to be standing there for something beyond the mere representation of their own species: coyotes, bald eagles, mustangs, rattlesnakes, the biggest lizards you’ve ever seen and even dinosaurs, bleeding tar and petrol all over a world obsessed with them. These are scenes from a Southern Gothic book still to be written by the likes of Flannery O’Connor, Cormac-McCarthy or DeLillo, interrupted by sudden flashbacks to vacant lots somewhere on the outskirts of Los Angeles, where the last dregs of thrasher and loser culture go to die.

Susa Monteiro

Susa Monteiro lives in Beja, the city where she was born.
She studied Plastic Production for Spectacles at the Cinema School of Amadora and animation at CITEN. For a few years, she worked in theatre and cinema as set and wardrobe designer, and prop maker.
In 2009, with the opening of Beja’s International Comics Festival and its own Bedetheque (in which she is both co-organizer and graphic director), she left the arts of the spectacle and dedicated herself exclusively to comics and illustration.
In the last years, she has illustrated many books for publishers such as Pato Lógico, Porto Editora, Bertrand, Asa, Verbo, Bruáa, Oficina do Livro, among others. She has also created posters and images for institutional projects (Casa da Música, Palavras Andarilhas, Almarte – Festival de Artes na Rua, La Guarimba International Film Festival, Play - Festival Internacional de cinema para a infância e juventude de Lisboa, Festival du Court Métrage de Clermont-Ferrand).
She publishes regularly illustrations and comics in many titles, from zines, newspapers, magazines and books.
She has also exhibited regularly in Comics Festivals and art galleries, both in solo and collective shows.