Alberto CarneiroCoronado ¶ 1937       Créditos fotográficos / Photographic credits:Abílio Leitão He was born in a small village in Minho, in northern Portugal, where he worked from 1947 to 1958 in several sacred art workshops that helped him to develop his sculpting techniques on wood, stone and ivory. He studied at the Decorative Arts Schools of Soares dos Reis (Porto) as well as that of António Arroio (Lisbon), and later went on to acquire a degree in Sculpture at the Fine Arts School of Porto. He eventually did a Master's at London's Saint Martin's School of Art. Since the late 60s, Carneiro's actions have been interdisciplinary focused upon a somewhat playful idea of recognizing the individual in the world, engendered from the cosmos that is represented in nature. ¶ During his stay in London, he came across with Anthony Caro's sculptures, and was swayed by the general aesthetic and ideological experiences of the 60s, namely the British chapter of Minimal and Conceptual art. This would trigger his own development of what would be innovative projects within the Portuguese milieu: O canavial: memória metamorfose de um corpo ausente (The marsh: memory metamorphosis of an absent body, 1968) and Uma floresta para os teus sonhos (A forest for your dreams, 1970) expose a special tendency towards the values of an "involving" art, one that discards the pre-eminence of manual labour for the reflection on the conceptual project, a progressive dematerialization of the work of art. This anthropological stance on artistic activities was done in tandem with an approach to the oriental philosophies of essence and nature (such as Zen Buddhism and Tantrism), which lead Carneiro to write a Manifesto da Arte Ecológica (Ecological Art Manifesto, 1968-72) the major key-notions of which are the refutation of the Westerner's sensuality/spirituality dualism and the promotion of "a rehabilitation of the simplest things in the significance of aesthetic communication". ¶ From all the projects of that period, we should stress the (Land Art-inspired) landscape interventions such as Operação Estética em Vilar do Paraíso (Aesthetical Action in Vilar do Paraíso, 1973), a minimal action done with a few hay rolls, or Operação Estética em Caldas de Aregos (Aesthetical Action in Caldas de Aregos), in which the artist engraved (branded) a stone with a spiral symbol, as well as with his signature and date (naming and possession-taking). A craving for origin and a returning to cosmic essences is evident in this work, and it maybe translated as an extreme, pure nature calling, something that lies between acting and reflecting, and can visualise the unity of body and matter.     View the embedded image gallery online at: http://cvc.instituto-camoes.pt/biografias-en-dp18.html?1=j1IwW#sigFreeIde74fd2482f   Ficha Técnica | Credits  

Ângela Ferreira Moçambique ¶ 1958     Créditos fotográficos / Photographic credits:Abílio Leitão Having both the South African and Portuguese nationality, she has been living in and out of the two countries. She finished her studies in 1985 at the Michaelis School of Fine Arts of the University of Cape Town, and the following years were spent in Lisbon, where she made a clear and quick ascent in the artistic milieu. ¶ Strangely enough, Portugal is a country without an operative memory of the most recent past, especially where its colonial past is concerned. Ferreira is the first artist to focus on this issue and make it her central theme. She is also the one who, within the national circle, inaugurated a new artistic problematic. Identity, understood as something closely linked to culture, gender, ethnic groupings, and sexual orientation, is the primary focal point of the artistic debates of the 90s. ¶ Due to her double cultural background, European and African, Ferreira attempts to reach that particular point of view that emerges as a non-point of view and constitutes a proposal for an ongoing dialogue. The artist deconstructs her own minimalist references by the sheer evocative power of memory. ¶ Between 1996 and 97, Ferreira engaged upon an illustrative project: at the Chinati Foundation in Texas, which was founded by Donald Judd whose work it holds, she created an installation that takes us back to the popular South-African woman artist Helen Martins. And in Nieu Bethesda, the locale where Martins lived, she used objects reminiscent of Judd's work. This double installation was titled Double Sided, and Ângela Ferreira reached a dialectic of contexts that can be understood as testimony to the geographical and cultural transience of existence. In Amnésia (Amnesia, 1997), she recreated a typical colonial scenery, a living room with all the period's furniture: the spectator could sit down in this space and watch a sentimental video on Portugal's colonial past. In the room next door, three African tree trunks were left lying on the floor. ¶ This ambivalence towards the colonial memory is experienced in the way she deals both with "official" history and that of her own associated, personal memories. By organizing, juxtaposing, and confronting objects, memories and architectures, Ângela Ferreira engages upon an inquiring strategy that operates formally at a level of artistic paradigms, on the one hand, via a permanent questioning of modernist structures, and conceptually at a civilisational level, on the other, via a permanent questioning of cultural determinisms. She was selected for the Portuguese chapter at the Venice Biennial 2007.     View the embedded image gallery online at: http://cvc.instituto-camoes.pt/biografias-en-dp18.html?1=j1IwW#sigFreeId195f56d914   Ficha Técnica | Credits  

António Dacosta Angra do Heroísmo ¶ 1914 -1990 ¶ Paris       Créditos fotográficos / Photographic credits:DR/ Cortesia Galeria III After completing a degree in painting at the Fine Arts School in Lisbon, he entered the Portuguese arts scene in 1940, together with António Pedro and Pamela Boden, thanks to a small exhibition they had in Lisbon. This exhibition already showed a strong surrealist tendency in his early work and constituted an aesthetical option diametrically opposed to the official one of the nationalistic, celebratory Exposição do Mundo Português (Exhibition of the Portuguese World). ¶ António Dacosta introduced in the Portuguese painting circle the possible combination between a surrealist, dream-like state and a particular interpretation of the myths from the islands of his origin (the Azores archipelago). Such a combination is visible in works such as Diálogo (Dialogue, 1939), Antítese da Calma (The Antithesis of Calm, 1940), Serenata Açoriana (Azores' Serenate, 1940) and A Festa (The Festival, 1942). The incommunicability and the sheer absurdity of the images of strange beings triggered an extraordinary poetic reordering, at surprising figurative levels. This is also the case in Amor Jacente (Leaning Love, 1941) or the enigmatic Episódio Com um Cão (Episode with a Dog, 1940) which reveal an uncanny explosion of the imagination that reaches a solid surreal atmosphere. ¶ The artist, who moved to Paris in 1946, overcame the formal quality and "convulsive" boldness of the few surrealist adventures ever attempted among Portuguese artists, becoming a central reference for the young people at the Lisbon Surrealist Group, during the second half of the 40s. ¶ After being well-established in Paris, and working as an art critic and a correspondent for several newspapers, such as O Estado de São Paulo (Brazil), Acção e Diário Popular (both Portuguese), the artist would develop, between 1947 and 49, abstract paintings, paintings that did not relinquish the dynamics of chance of the surreal tradition, sustaining with it a thin line of kinship via the titles, as in the case of, for instance, Cuidado com os Filhos (Beware of the Children, 1948). After 1949, Dacosta abandoned all artistic activity. ¶ After a 25 year gap, Dacosta returned to painting in 1975, opening up his work to a somewhat Matisse-like lyricism, cast by soft chromatic composition values that arrive at a very intense poetic expression, branding his work until the end of his days. In the last few years, especially from 1980 onwards, he turned to poetry, reaching a level of labour as dense as that of his pictorial practice. The poems would be published only posthumously, in 1993, in A Cal dos Muros (The Lime on the Walls).   View the embedded image gallery online at: http://cvc.instituto-camoes.pt/biografias-en-dp18.html?1=j1IwW#sigFreeIdc2bb346c8c   Ficha Técnica | Credits  

António Sena Lisboa ¶ 1941     Créditos fotográficos / Photographic credits:DR/ Cortesia Galeria Filomena Soares After giving up his schooling in the sciences, and dedicating himself fully to engraving, he had his first individual exhibition in 1964 followed by a collective one in 65. He then went to study at London's St. Martin's School of Arts for a year on a Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation scholarship and eventually returned to Portugal in the mid-70s. ¶ After being briefly influenced by pop art, towards the end of the 60s Sena's painting would become closer and closer to a gestural informalism in which chromatic smoothness and purity existed concurrently with calligraphic motion. The author used mixed techniques in his painting, from soft spraying some pre-established moulds, both the face and its reverse, to a unique style of dripping, thus sustaining a balance between the organization coolness of the pictorial space and the surprise of gestural chance. On the other hand, this is a painting style indebted to the disciplinary exercise of drawing, not a naturalistic sort of drawings, of course, but rather as a sign inscription technique and an engraving incision in the pictorial surface. Crossed lines, imperceptible calculations with lines scratched over them, and correction lines are the inhabitants of this work, both in his pictorial work as in his autonomous drawings exercises. ¶ During the 70s, an almost pure colour becomes an integrant part of his informalist and gestural painting studies. However, there is an accretion to a systematic inscription of an equally abstracticising writing. The 80s would witness an ongoing progress of such informalist, calligraphic chromatist choices, and the 90s would see some chromatic experiences closer to earth hues, browns, ochres, and yellows. Since 2000 António Sena seems to be redirecting his painting towards an essencialisation of a graphic level of speech (whether alphabetic or numeric), whereby he decreases the number of crossed lines to make room for the small symbols of his geometrising research, while keeping the same earth hues of his previous work.     View the embedded image gallery online at: http://cvc.instituto-camoes.pt/biografias-en-dp18.html?1=j1IwW#sigFreeId7f9bb71289   Ficha Técnica | Credits  

Eduardo BatardaCoimbra ¶ 1943     Créditos fotográficos / Photographic credits:Abílio Leitão He was a Medical school student, but moved to Lisbon, to study at the Fine Arts School of Lisbon between 1963 and 68. His first exhibition was held in 1968 at the Quadrante gallery, in a period when he exercised a Pop Art-influenced figurativism, as well as illustration and comics-related techniques and other "marginal" typologies of figuration. ¶ Between 1971 and 74, as a student at London's Royal College of Art, he achieved remarkable watercolour technical skills. He returned in 1974 to Portugal and exhibits works at Gulbenkian that seem to prolong his previous figurative and chromatic options, and even choice of humour, although clearly revealing a penchant for scandalous topics such as sexuality, and mixing literary allusions and commentaries on his contemporary state of affairs, whether political or artistic. In the late 70s, he moved to Porto, where he became a teacher at the Fine Arts School of Porto. ¶ The 80s are a turning point for Batarda. To begin with, his chromatic palette becomes much more grave, densified, and his network of source material becomes larger, embracing the whole of the History of Art, brought about whether by recurrent formal archetypes or other quite erudite details. The commentary aspect becomes more ciphered, less explicit. ¶ These new paintings, at a more emotional, immediate level, have a tendency to suggest a certain vortex effect, as if in a whirlwind, an abyss of sorts - sometimes through a quite literal representation. ¶ During the 90s, the colours return to their rightful place in Batarda's painting. They displace the blacks, and they seem to open from within, whereby form strengthens its dynamic dimension. The 1997 works have the brand of a strong tendency towards diversification, by the resurfacing of elements from earlier phases of the author. ¶ Since 2000, his painting has entered yet a new phase, the main characteristic of which is a clear distinction between form and content, due to the high contrast of two uniform colours. These are works that bring closely together a certain degree of formal contention and the author's ability for an infinite, good-humoured multiplication of suggestions, which is one of his work's main features.     View the embedded image gallery online at: http://cvc.instituto-camoes.pt/biografias-en-dp18.html?1=j1IwW#sigFreeId0a1c8c1a43   Ficha Técnica | Credits  

Álvaro Lapa Évora ¶ 1939-2006 ¶ Porto       Créditos fotográficos / Photographic credits:Abílio Leitão He studied philosophy at Lisbon University. From the beginning and in relation to the visual arts field he chose an isolated and autodidact path. ¶ Ever since his first individual exhibition at the 111 gallery in Lisbon in 1964, Lapa's work has engaged in an enigmatic management of forms, by using an oblique system of signs, and refuting any kind of aesthetical balance or skill-achievement. This system is mainly a personalized and debatable writing code, which forces us to think about the fascination exerted by contiguous, dissimilar forms. To some extent, it is close to Artaud's or Bataille's amorphous, but with allusions and eventual filiations with both European and North-American abstract expressionists (in particular with Robert Motherwell's work), as well as with European Surrealism, namely where the narrative tension opened up by formal deconstructivism is concerned. ¶ The autonomy of the visual values of Lapa's painting is counterbalanced by the enduring marks - pointed out autobiographically - left by literary influences that lead him to, for instance, the outstanding series of "notebooks", each related to a certain writer, whose group constitute, as it were, Lapa's very own subversive Library: Rimbaud, Kafka, Henry Miller, James Joyce, William Burroughs, Sade, Michaux and many others. Furthermore, in Lapa's painting the cut-up technique developed by the Beat Generation authors wields a fruitful influence, in the way it fragments itself and hampers any possibility of a final, even stable semiotic reading. ¶ Lapa's denial for the evident or for any legibility conventions are not a mere theoretical exercise of conceptual analyses, but rather a quest for an inner authenticity that creates a unique language, as if dictated by an intimate rhythm. ¶ In a sense, Álvaro Lapa's painting may be regarded as a subversive evaluation of painting, a partner in crime of clandestine writings, or, in a more intimate sense, as a diary of a universe that is captured by the true idiosyncrasy of a personal universe.     View the embedded image gallery online at: http://cvc.instituto-camoes.pt/biografias-en-dp18.html?1=j1IwW#sigFreeIdfdbfe63960   Ficha Técnica | Credits  

Ângelo de SousaMoçambique ¶ 1938       Créditos fotográficos / Photographic credits:Maria Antonieta - 1987 He earned his degree in painting at the Fine Arts School of Porto, where he worked as a painting teacher for almost four decades. Between 1967 and 68 he lived in London on the basis of a British Council scholarship. ¶ Ângelo de Sousa's career started off in the 1950s but it is only in the 60s that we can say that his work began to be noticed. From the outset, and through an economy of means, his painting attempts to accomplish an utmost formal simplicity and purity. One can realize this both in his early figurative work as well as in his later abstractionism. ¶ Throughout the 60s, Sousa used a pictorial vocabulary that stressed particular elements. These usually comprised natural motifs such as trees, horses, plants, flowers, and fountains. Even in his generically figurative works, one can detect a certain affiliation with Minimalism, which he would develop later on. It constituted a progression that replaced those first figurativist approaches with an increasingly formal depuration, and eventually an almost complete abstraction. Intimately associated with this ascetic progress, one should focus one's attention on Sousa's thorough technological research, which has developed parallel to his pictorial practice, especially where the materials and the interaction between those diverse materials were concerned, and that would bring about repercussions on both a formal and imagistic level. ¶ In manly of the works of his last two decades, the apparent monochromic works make the variations present in the pictorial surface nearly imperceptible. Colour actually emerges through faint modulations. In these particular works, it's through very subtle lines that a precise geometry is made evident, as in a "trompe l'oeil" that reveals volume projection now, returning to the surface then, dissipating thus any alleged border between form and content. ¶ It is precisely this issue of form and content that lies at the centre of his experimental movies, shot in the 70s. A series of self-portraits done between 1971 and 72 will join this concern to that of the surface's organicity, a concern he would readdress in 1995. In the latter work, he transcends form in search of texture and volume by defocusing and dragging. ¶ First and foremost, Ângelo de Sousa is an explorer of chromatism, and all its subtleties. Although one can associate him with minimalism in Sousa's chromatic enquiries one may also feel something from suprematism's very own kind of romanticism.     View the embedded image gallery online at: http://cvc.instituto-camoes.pt/biografias-en-dp18.html?1=j1IwW#sigFreeId4166292547   Ficha Técnica | Credits  

António Palolo Évora ¶ 1946-2000 ¶ Lisboa       Créditos fotográficos / Photographic credits:DR/ Cortesia Galeria III Although an autodidact, he revealed from early on a desire to take on an experimentalist stance towards the visual arts. He would form a group with other young artists in such pursuit, such as Álvaro Lapa, Joaquim Bravo and António Charrua. ¶ His work throughout the 60s is basically a result of a constant blending and questioning of the dominant aesthetics of the international art scene, which drifted between informalism, formal abstractionism and pop art. His pictorial exercises, in which pure colour reach a high level of seduction, are able to organize a very peculiar, even original opticality, within the framework of Portuguese painting. Moreover, it is the definition of his contrasting colour areas that will dictate, during the second half of the 60s, his progressive rejection of his own early figurativism, tinted by a certain pop flavour. ¶ During the 70s, Palolo's chromatic explosion allies itself to a formal will, which begs for precise composition planning, a reconciliation between smooth colours and geometrical figures, and in which brush lines disappear entirely. This is an experience that seems to mix two apparently antagonist tendencies, pop and minimal art. ¶ When Palolo participates in the 1983 Depois do Modernismo (After Modernism) exhibition, he is already showing some concern towards the expressive values of pictorialism, somehow in the steps of a certain "Transavantgarde", revealing once again the meaningfulness of figuration in a pertinent dialogue with a new colour scheme and more expressionist, almost gesture-like techniques. In the 90s, Palolo squared off two distinct moments of his career, opening up the necessary conditions for the harmonization of composition with his bands of pure colour with the expressive, gesture exercises of his latest phase. ¶ Between the 70s and the 80s, incorporated in the time's transdisciplinary tendencies, António Palolo created a few installations and shot experimental movies, developing a formal approach in which the cinematics of image were crucial, with the expected repercussions on his pictorial work.     View the embedded image gallery online at: http://cvc.instituto-camoes.pt/biografias-en-dp18.html?1=j1IwW#sigFreeId75545fab1f   Ficha Técnica | Credits  

Daniel BlaufuksLisboa ¶ 1963       Créditos fotográficos / Photographic credits:Abílio Leitão He studied photography at Lisbon's Ar.Co and London's Royal College of Art. He had his first exhibition at the Ether gallery in Lisbon in 1990, and has since been an important, constant presence on the Portuguese cultural scene. ¶ Blaukfus regards the practice of photography as a privileged pathway into intimacy and he structures his work in series, as if in a graphic diary, and introduces possible poetic readings of his images by suggesting a narrative line. By the introduction of a title, his photographs put on a communicational cover, the message of which the spectator arrives at intuitively (Collected Short Stories, CAM, 2003). And, much like one from French-speaking cinema traditions or the work of American independent filmmakers, all his motifs are relational. ¶ To be. To leave. To stay. To look at. To dream of. Photographs are as windows to the states of the soul, to everyday "small nothings". Everything is underlined by a lyrical notion of existence. A girl in sun glasses, raindrops on a pane, on a window of a plane or of a shop. Blaukfus's gaze becomes impregnated by an adolescent candour that reflects back at us a world in which each and every object is worthy of aesthetic redemption. ¶ The journey is a central theme to his work, a theme that circumscribes both his personal life and his family's memory, marked by the exile from Germany, a sense of errancy, as described by the author himself in Sob Céus Estranhos (Under Foreign Skies, 2002), a poetic view of his Jewish heritage. Most of his life was spent in New York - where he lived in several artists' residences, such as the International Studio Program or Location One - and Lisbon, but his travels to London, Tangier and Berlin also left significant markings. ¶ Looking at his life's oeuvre, it appears that Daniel Blaukfus's main vein expresses the idea that what is eminently personal is precisely what is eminently sharable. He was the BES Photo 2006 award winner.     View the embedded image gallery online at: http://cvc.instituto-camoes.pt/biografias-en-dp18.html?1=j1IwW#sigFreeId5b28c64081   Ficha Técnica | Credits  

Fernando Calhau Lisboa ¶ 1948 -2001 ¶ Lisboa       Créditos fotográficos / Photographic credits:Julião Sarmento He started his artistic career from an early age. He was 20 years old when he had his first individual exhibition. He completed engraving courses at London's Slade School, and continued to use the technique in his work both formally and conceptually. This also draws attention to the two decisive traits of his career: the recurrence of series and a monochromatic proclivity. ¶ The synthesis between Minimalism and Conceptualism was clear right from the start, with his first works depicting monumental rigueur and formal depuration. The theme of this author is the void, or better still, the framing thereof, whether we're dealing with his "monochromes", repeated to obsession, or with his beach polaroids. To the latter he adds an imaginary square, which he draws over them, as if mimicking his own gestures that try to draw a frame in thin air and in which the horizon is placed. ¶ Another conceptual art-inherited problematic in Calhau's work is the continuous reference to language and to the problem of enunciation. In all his choices, he has searched for the right "support", that is to say, the implicit form that makes possible and produces the explicit form. ¶ His artistic development is very diverse where disciplines are concerned, for he has worked on drawing, video and super-8 film. These comprise processes and materials that are nonetheless typical of conceptual and post-conceptual art. Photography and the text-image combination reveal an analytical concern with the breakdown of a work in its minor components. ¶ He started his series Night Works in the 70s, making use of neon and iron as support. ¶ By bringing to light the lunar heat of graphite and neon, as well as the silent resonance of words such as "dark", "blue", "endless" and "timeless", Fernando Calhau expresses a romantic disrobement, as it were connected to a subtle sensuality. ¶ There is a somewhat monastic-like nature shining through his work, that is not devoid of humour, but that nevertheless asserts itself first and foremost by way of its focus, its discipline and its detailed quality.     View the embedded image gallery online at: http://cvc.instituto-camoes.pt/biografias-en-dp18.html?1=j1IwW#sigFreeIdd11ab50ae0   Ficha Técnica | Credits