Camouflage

Lions Hunt (after Delacroix, 2016) by José Almeida Pereira is in the tradition of hunting and battle scenes produced by great figures in the history of art. When Eugène Delacroix painted his Lion Hunt in 1855, an energetic and dramatic composition imbued with orientalism, he himself was inspired by Peter Paul Rubens‘ Baroque Hunt series, and more specifically by his Tiger and Lion Hunt painted between 1615 and 1617, to which Delacroix had had access through engravings. 

Following Rubens’ composition, Delacroix’s scene is constructed in a sort of Fibonacci spiral. Starting with the central hunter on the ground, the movement follows the lines of the fallen rider on the left, continues with the wounded, roaring lion and the rider at the top centre, moves on to the hunter with a spear and the female lion on a grey horse, and ends at the right edge of the painting with the fallen rider holding a musket. 

Although José Almeida Pereira reproduces Delacroix’s composition almost à l’identique, he nevertheless obliterates its polychromy and the harmonious contrasts achieved by the juxtaposition of complementary colours: the red and orange fabrics and tunics against the blue elements and the verdant natural backdrop. The artist operates a chromatic distortion, melting the human and animal subjects with the surrounding landscape in a polarised combination of different shades of cyan and pink.


The overall ghosting effect is reminiscent of visual and cinematographic productions designed for anaglyph red-cyan 3D glasses, which use stereoscopy to create the impression of depth in two-dimensional images. The artist’s visual play evokes the technique of superimposed images of two contrasting colours with an offset, which, when viewed through the corresponding coloured filters, prompt the brain to process the illusion of depth. By associating Delacroix’s hunting scene with the visual and chromatic effects applied to images designed to be viewed through anaglyph 3D glasses, Almeida Pereira fuses erudite references drawn from art history with modern techniques associated with popular culture and the entertainment industry.

If the agitation in Delacroix and in Rubens’ hunts already made the scene difficult to “read”, the chromatic twist introduced by Almeida Pereira with its simultaneously spectral and pop effects makes it even harder to perceive. Hence the artist’s link with camouflage and the play on visuality and perception. By using strategies such as the confusion of figures and background, merging them in the same chromatic environment, Almeida Pereira makes the elements of the composition more difficult to detect and identify.

Katherine Sirois for the exhibition Camouflage at P31, Lisbon, June 2025.