Ângelo de Sousa

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.

 

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