António Sena

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.

 

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