ENERELIS – A World Between Reality and Fantasy

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Créditos

Patrícia Costa

Enerelis grew out of the countless worlds its author, Patrícia Costa, has been creating since her teens: worlds of escape from reality, worlds with room for every one of her dreams and desires.

Built on rich high-fantasy worldbuilding — characters, landscapes, architecture — and spanning the earliest studies from 2008 through to the most recent ones, from graphite layouts to the finished digital artwork of her pages, this exhibition mirrors the intricate tapestry of the universe the author has created across the first seven volumes of Crónicas de Enerelis (Chronicles of Enerelis), an independently published comics series.

With art rooted in the aesthetics of Japanese manga and drawing on the storytelling of the great epic-fantasy adventures, the series is a journey of learning and growth — not only for its protagonist, Eyren Caeli, and for its readers, but for the author herself, who describes herself as an artist under construction, page after page, volume after volume.

Patrícia Costa

Patrícia Costa (Fundão, b. 1983) showed an early interest in anime and Japanese visual culture, spending her time reproducing characters in her drawings. At fourteen she began creating and illustrating her own stories, taking the first steps on a creative path that would come to define her career.

She graduated in Architecture from ISCTE and worked professionally in the field for nine years. Her passion for visual storytelling and character creation eventually led her to change course, and in 2016 she decided to devote herself entirely to illustration and comics.

In 2018 she took part in the first Introduction to Sequential Art course in Montijo, taught by Susana Resende. Since then she has entered numerous comics competitions and published work in independent editions, anthologies and fanzines, gathering a number of nominations and distinctions along the way.

She is currently developing Crónicas de Enerelis, an epic fantasy series written, drawn, finished and published by the author herself. Inspired by the aesthetics of Japanese manga, the work is planned to run to twelve volumes. With seven already published, it follows the journey of Eyren Caeli, a young man who hopes to become an official maegian — one of the magical classes of Enerelis, one of three worlds running parallel to Earth.

The narrative traces the protagonist's growth from adolescence into adulthood, moving from a lighter register towards progressively deeper and more complex themes. Patrícia Costa is currently at work on Volume 8, due for release in November 2026.