The Tree as a Symbol Rogério Ribeiro, one of the exponents of the contemporary Portuguese artistic scene, marked in 2000 at the Galveias Palace in Lisbon, his fifty years of artistic activity. The exemplary career of an artist-teacher who brought together critical reflection and creation in various expressions was thus honored: drawing, painting, engraving, ceramics, tapestry ;aria, well demonstrating its versatility. In the small format drawings and in the immense paintings, sometimes formed by juxtaposed panels, the author's technical mastery was highlighted, inseparable from a high aesthetic sense and a poetic breath that animates the whole of his work. work. The rigor of the stroke, the strength of the line, its rhythm, convey in the drawings, the breathing of plastic forms, not an imitation of life, but the reflection of your hidden soul. In painting, under the sign of the figurative, the splendor of a plastic matter that subtly asserts its power in the dialogue of forms and spaces, orchestrated by the acute sense of proportions, studied in function of a composition guided by balance and harmony within a surprisingly creative complexity. In these screen prints, the painter represents a work scenario that, due to the motifs involved, trees, stairs, provides an intertwined and rich composition, animated by cold and warm tones in harmonies guided by the painter's particular mastery. The tree associated with the tree The ladder appears as a symbolic motif of ascension and the redemption linked to it.