Álvaro Lapa

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.

 

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