Joaquim Rodrigo Lisboa ¶ 1912 -1996 ¶ Lisboa         Créditos fotográficos / Photographic credits:DR/ Cortesia Divisão de Documentação Fotográfica - Instituto Português de Museus Graduating in Agronomy in 1939, his inclination towards painting would only bloom as an adult, a situation that would clearly brand his path as that of an independent. Despite his self-taught beginnings, he would take a few courses in the 50s, namely at the National Society of Fine Arts (SNBA), bringing him close to a modernist penchant that was rarely expressed in Portugal. From a most private "cognitive project", Rodrigo created his very own, highly complex system of the pictorial practice. By understanding the modernist painting of the historical avant-gardes as a language which was developed according to a particular semiotic system, the artist would revaluate his ever-present, most important sources of information: science and art. His purpose was not to value geometric abstractization as a metaphysical transcendentalization, as in the early works of Kandinsky or, albeit differently, that of Mondrian and Malevich, but rather to use it as a radically new and operative concept. ¶ To Rodrigo the canvas became a space for perceptual research. He used diverse composition architectures, pursued the two-dimensional essence of the canvas, and recurred to striking formal and light contrasts, constantly opposing lines, as well as pure and organic forms, and complementary colours. This almost scientific abstraction project steered Rodrigo's pictorial production throughout the whole of the 50s. ¶ The 60s would herald a crucial transition for Joaquim Rodrigo. The first change that occurred was that he began bestowing an unexpected value upon the role of colour in the composition; the second was the creation of a complete symbolic vocabulary of painting, in which social and political conscience was allied to personal memories, inscribing figurative and verbal signs in the compositional field. A major influence and fascination of this time would be the reading of anthropologist José Redinha's book Paredes Pintadas da Lunda (The Painted Walls of Luanda, 1953), which moved Rodrigo towards a non-western narrative tradition. He would later elaborate on his own theory, writing between 1976 and 1982 Complementarismo em Pintura (Complementarism in Painting), a thorough and difficult "contribution to the science of art", which Rodrigo would uphold, until the end of his life, as the "painting right" method, a method that would enable any person to become a painter.   View the embedded image gallery online at: http://cvc.instituto-camoes.pt/biografias-en/page-2-dp4.html?1=j1IwW&2=j1IwW&3=j1IwW#sigFreeId4be42b1658 Ficha Técnica | Credits  

Jorge MolderLisboa ¶ 1947     Créditos fotográficos / Photographic credits:Abílio Leitão His career as a photographer began with an individual exhibition in 1977, the subject of which was Vilarinho das Furnas (near the Gerês mountain range in Portugal) and in which what would be Molder's nostalgic inclination throughout his work was already present, accentuated by the use of black and white and the light sfumatto that only rarely is absent from his photographs. ¶ In 1980, he co-presented, with poets João Miguel Fernandes Jorge and Joaquim Manuel Magalhães, Uma Exposição (An Exhibition). In doing so, he made his first steps towards developing an interest in narrative strategies and a clearly cinematographic penchant in his work. In these first examples, the "film noir", under the auspices of Dashiell Hammett, are the aesthetic patina through which the abandoned places that Molder chooses as his backdrops can be seen. Such a cinematographic trait would only be reinforced when Molder implements the series as a structuring category of his work. In the whole of his artistic career, the series will become the most ubiquitous sense-producing mechanism, associated to a quasi-obsessive practice of self-portraits. ¶ In Joseph Conrad (1990) or The Secret Agent (1991), we can observe a progression of sceneries and props that might create the illusion of a suspended narrative, quite similarly to the clues scattered through a crime novel or a fantastic tale whose actual line of action is obscure. ¶ Although Jorge Molder took on self-portrayal as early as 1981, its current contours would only be filled up later. Presented also in series, his self-portraits have become an issue of self-representation, in which the "I" is revealed but also hidden from sight via the emergence of an "Other", that is, the protagonist of representation. ¶ In between the film noir and the Victorian novel, the secret agent and Mr. Hyde, the "Other" is the one who has broken free from his own body and acknowledges its own spectral condition, or in other words the condition of photography itself. As the ultimate confirmation of this condition, one must simply look at the series Nox (1999 Venice biennial), in which, in due course, the density of the blacks threatens to absorb the characters completely.     View the embedded image gallery online at: http://cvc.instituto-camoes.pt/biografias-en/page-2-dp4.html?1=j1IwW&2=j1IwW&3=j1IwW#sigFreeIdf12c575fcf   Ficha Técnica | Credits  

José de GuimarãesGuimarães ¶ 1939     Créditos fotográficos / Photographic credits:Abílio Leitão He graduated in Civil Engineering at IST. In 1958, he took up painting and drawing classes with Teresa de Sousa and Gil Teixeira Lopes, and a printing course at SCGP. Between 1961 and 1966 he travelled through Europe and, between 1967 and 1974, he was stationed in Angola serving with the arm. Nevertheless he became entangled with the international aesthetic propensities of the 60s, its discourses and practices, especially the colour exuberance of pop art, which the artist would tie in with Angolan cultural archetypes. ¶ Influenced by native African art, but enhancing it with a simultaneously erudite and Western dimension, the artist was able to create a subtle alliance between the "comedy" and the "tragedy" of human life, progressively de-dramatizing his compositions until he reached the stage of centring the cultural matrix of European painting in his "motifs-series" (Kings, The Lovers, The Painter and the Model, the Circus, Sports, and Portuguese Landscapes). ¶ After moving to Antwerp in 1976, his work began to achieve international recognition, specifically with his Rubens homage series. In 1978 he created a very peculiar Alfabeto de Símbolos (Alphabet of Symbols), which became a source for formal-symbolical references. For instance, the "pseudo-sculptures" he developed in 1980, made from thick, granulated paper, would draw from that "coded vocabulary" a panoply of forms, with a noteworthy impact at a signical level. They generate a bodily synthesis with an optimistic Biomorphism in which colour has an essential compositional role. ¶ Inspired by the essentialist tendencies of Eastern spirituality, the author integrated in his oeuvre formal stereotypes from other cultures (Mexican, Japanese), always involving them in a dialogue with Western artistic contexts, from primitive art to a Picassoan modernism. ¶ In the 90s, after opening up his work to themes such as death and spiritual reflection, as well as rather Informalism - and materialism - influenced values, the artist's oeuvre was finally at the centre of national recognition, with retrospectives at the Serralves and the Gulbenkian foundations, as well as several interventions in public spaces, both abroad and at home. One of the most important events was the 2004 exhibition at the Cordoaria Nacional, at which a minutely detailed catalogue-book was published.     View the embedded image gallery online at: http://cvc.instituto-camoes.pt/biografias-en/page-2-dp4.html?1=j1IwW&2=j1IwW&3=j1IwW#sigFreeId51611324d0   Ficha Técnica | Credits  

Julião SarmentoLisboa ¶ 1948     Créditos fotográficos / Photographic credits:Abílio Leitão After graduating in Architecture at the Fine Arts School of Lisbon (1967-1974), he began his career as a painter and today he is one of the most firmly internationalised Portuguese artists. ¶ After a pop-inspired figuration phase and post-conceptual practices, mainly on film, to which he has returned in more recent years, he is known above all as a painter, intimately related to the 80s generation "back to painting" trend, the decade in which the artist achieved his first international recognition with his participation at two Documentas (Kassel, Germany, 1982 and 1987). ¶ As a painter, Sarmento uses very different assets, juxtaposing popular and erudite references. The resulting effect bifurcates towards two universes, literature and cinema, the very two structural axes of his whole work. ¶ In its early stage, Sarmento's painting juxtaposes, on the one hand, fragments, images of glamour and violence, and on the other hand, the word, which takes the role of a caveat. Likewise, it explores the imagetics of the unconscious and the disturbing nature of intermissions in representation. ¶ With the transition from the 80s to the 90s, his painting becomes more sober and restrained, achieving a monastic-like depuration, a phase known by an all-encompassing designation, Pinturas Brancas (White Paintings) in which graphite over white canvas drawings are predominant. At the same time, this stage concurs with Sarmento's consecration, as he is the Portuguese representative at the 1997 Venice biennial. ¶ The representation of the feminine body, which had always been present - if not comprised his own brand image - reaches a new level of subtlety and allusion. Making his stock-in-trade "interrupted drawings"    more explicit, the artist pursues his unquenchable search for harmonizing the task of visual creation and invention with the discovery of the territories of formulating and questioning desire in its infinite modulations.     View the embedded image gallery online at: http://cvc.instituto-camoes.pt/biografias-en/page-2-dp4.html?1=j1IwW&2=j1IwW&3=j1IwW#sigFreeId3b1f74ba82   Ficha Técnica | Credits  

Lourdes CastroFunchal ¶ 1930     Créditos fotográficos / Photographic credits:DR/ Cortesia Assírio & Alvim She graduated in painting at the Fine Arts School of Lisbon in 1956. ln the subsequent year she travelled to Munich, Germany, with René Bertholo, Costa Pinheiro and a handful of other Portuguese young artists, all recipients of scholarships from the Gulbenkian Foundation. A few months later, in 1958, she moved to Paris, this time only in the company of René Bertholo. Together they founded the KWY group and magazine (existing until 1963). In her early work, there was a clear predominance of an lnformalism-influenced abstractionism, which slowly yet progressively would return to neo-figurativism. ¶ Normal 0 21 false false false PT ZH-CN AR-SA MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Tabela normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin-top:0cm; mso-para-margin-right:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:10.0pt; mso-para-margin-left:0cm; line-height:115%; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:11.0pt; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii-font-family:Calibri; mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-hansi-font-family:Calibri; mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:Arial; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} The artist's path would lead her through the abandonment of the most traditional of methods, means and supports, dedicating herself to an interdisciplinary work process, which would begin with the first neo-dada "assemblages", albeit within the panorama of the then contemporary French "nouveau réalisme", in which the random-like amalgamation of small objects inside boxes goes through a uniform monochromatization using aluminium paint. The form's aura that would become attached to the newly created object converts itself into a process of subtle affirmation of the possible outline that the objects or the people can attain. This can be seen, for instance, with the people drawn only in their outer contours in Sombras (Shadows), a theme that from the 60s onwards would become not only essential to her work, but constant, given the fact that it is still present in her more contemporary pieces. Whether over sheets, plexiglas or fluorescent acrylic cut-outs, Lourdes Castro amplifies the two-dimensionality of the tableaux, and gives it a new thickness, a new visual three-dimensionality. The author creates a paradox out of her own time's artistic clash, the one between art's objectification and dematerialization, leaving behind the previous central issue, representation. After the early 80s, Lourdes Castro created a series of drawings, entitled Sombras à Volta de um Centro (Shadows About a Centre). These prolong the very reflective sense of temporality and life's destinies, by employing "objects" of Nature as an interpretation of the Romantic cultural tradition. In 2000, Lourdes Castro was awarded the Grand Prix EDP for the Visual Arts after participating in that same year's São Paulo biennial with an installation co-created with Francisco Tropa: an immense white fabric on top of a huge, long table strongly lightened upon, in such a way that the folds of the fabric were much accentuated.   View the embedded image gallery online at: http://cvc.instituto-camoes.pt/biografias-en/page-2-dp4.html?1=j1IwW&2=j1IwW&3=j1IwW#sigFreeId841601ab01   Ficha Técnica | Credits  

Jorge MartinsLisboa ¶ 1940       Créditos fotográficos / Photographic credits:Abílio Leitão Between 1957 and 1961, he attended the Architecture and Painting courses at the Fine Arts School of Lisbon. In 1958 he took up printing at the SCGP. In 1961 he moved to Paris, but in the period from 1965 to 1971 he would regularly spend time at Vieira da Silva's studio. After 13 years away from home, Martins briefly visited Portugal; and after a short stay in New York, he returned to Paris in 1976. In 1991, no less than 30 years after he left, the artist returned to his home country. ¶ In the turn of the 50s and the 60s, Martins began as an heir to the then-called "abstract neo-impressionism". He would soon, however, break away from the "wistful abstractionism", taking on a "neo-figurativism" that puts across a very peculiar, intimate dimension. ¶ The 60s, which witness in Martins a growing economy of simplicity, are a key point in time in terms of the artist's recognition. Light will become the unifying element of the artist's explorations, and it will also become the central theme of his representation: sources of light, light as the immanent presence of the support, the canvas's very surface as a result of light, colours as the resulting objects of the play of light and shadow, light as the shaping agent of objects. ¶ Throughout the 70s, his canvas became saturated with colour but towards the final years of the decade it would swerve back towards abstraction, although it would always fluctuate in between abstraction and figurativism. At the same time, words became an integrant part of signification. ¶ Jorge Martins dedicated himself to a systematic, thorough study of the theory of light and colour in the following decades, which led him to the most shadowy pictorial approaches he ever created, and which would be exhibited at Culturgest in 1991. ¶ In all of his oeuvre, the enigmatic is an element that emerges through the interplay of light occulting/revealing, as well as his constant re-inscription of every object, figure or sign on a different level, in a different spatial-time domain. The very characters are enigmatic by their formal lack of definition: they are almost-letters, almost-numbers, almost-signs, perhaps hieroglyphs. The same ambiguity is present quite often in the images and figures he evokes. The ensuing tension between rhythm (flux of colour or light) and sign (a stop, a moment that is distinguished from the flux) is only a supplementary corroboration of this condition, which one may consider paradigmatic of Jorge Martins' work.     View the embedded image gallery online at: http://cvc.instituto-camoes.pt/biografias-en/page-2-dp4.html?1=j1IwW&2=j1IwW&3=j1IwW#sigFreeId763ae1aa99   Ficha Técnica | Credits  

Jorge Queiroz Lisboa ¶ 1966       Créditos fotográficos / Photographic credits:Abílio Leitão After a course at Ar.Co and a short stay at the Royal College of Art in London, he entered the New York School of Visual Arts in 1997, where he remained for the ensuing six years. ¶ In 2004 he moved to Berlin. His is a solid international projection, both in galleries and museums. Highlights of his career are his participation in the 2003 Venice biennial and the 2004 São Paulo biennial, in both occasions invited by the international curators, Francesco Bonami and Alfons Hug respectively. ¶ Working mainly with drawing, Jorge Queiroz steps out of a chiefly post-surrealist and post-symbolic scene to trace a path of his own. One recurring trait throughout his artistic approach is the absence of any titles or any kind of account of his work, an absence that points out to an a-linguistic universe whose nature is absolutely devoid of narrative linearity. In his dream-like landscapes one finds no organization, no hierarchy, and both the figure-background and the inside-outside relations are subverted. What remains is only a plethora of lines, blots, and marks that seem to turn about their own innards. By evoking the alchemical world of a Klein bottle, a self-closed bottle which turns its mouth into itself and that was used by Duchamp in his studies on the fourth dimension, we can say that Jorge Queiroz' drawings attempt at tapping into that same fourth dimension, which is a mathematical possibility as well as an old, undying aspiration. ¶ By the continuous employment of the inversion of content and container, a perception of obscure energy is expressed, an energy that has been ever-present in the past century in the arts and sciences. Whether through outrageous notions such as ectoplasm or telekinesis or through extraordinary evidence, for example in the form of radioactivity, magnetism or electricity, a powerful imaginary becomes embodied that is both fantastic and phantasmatic. Jorge Queiroz is part of this imaginary, and he has shown us proof that contemporaneity is far, far from reaching a notion of identity as Form, of the I-skin, or of classicism.     View the embedded image gallery online at: http://cvc.instituto-camoes.pt/biografias-en/page-2-dp4.html?1=j1IwW&2=j1IwW&3=j1IwW#sigFreeId2c32b11591   Ficha Técnica | Credits  

José Pedro CroftPorto ¶ 1957     Créditos fotográficos / Photographic credits:Abílio Leitão Although he attended the Painting course of the Fine Arts School of Lisbon between 1976 and 1981, it would be as a sculptor that he would achieve his success. During the first phase of his work, in the first half of the 80s, Croft revealed his fascination with the mysterious solemnity of funeral monuments, brought to mind by his stone sculptures/installations. Stone is directly and often transformed by means of industrial tools, which beyond creating a singular corroded appearance also strengthen the desired effect, to wit, that of a ruin. Later, Croft moved towards a technique of stacking the resulting fragments of industrial processing, and created a series of columns, arches, boxes, tumuli, houses and guardhouses that bring to centre-stage spatial relations and varied references to architecture. ¶ Progressively, his work became divested from its metaphorical connections, emerging as rather abstract exercises, which nonetheless live in an intermediate state, between one state and another, an inner space and an outer space, stability and fall. ¶ In the early 90s his reference horizon widened beyond architecture to incorporate objects of daily life. In the period immediately following his sculptures would make use of pre-existing furniture pieces such as stools, chairs and tables. By approaching his own previous monumental quotation as well as these quotidian objects, the artists triggers a short-circuit in his system. However, one must notice that in Croft's work all the references are always dissociated from their original functional and utilitarian context. Croft's objects inhabit a parallel universe. ¶ Throughout the 90s, Croft's oeuvre became consolidated through the dialectics between the radical depuration of the archetype and the intimate presence of the given object. The resulting tension builds a cosmic-like suspense that the sculptor cleverly manages in the utmost equilibrium situations. ¶ In the work developed in the last few years, José Pedro Croft has refined and intensified this line of research in sculpture by incorporating glass and mirrors. These particular materials reaffirm the inference of the spectator's body in the work's perception as they also broaden the problematization of other kinds of perception, specifically those of space and the physicality/evanescence of bodies. In 2006 he held an important itinerant, anthological exhibition in Brazil.     View the embedded image gallery online at: http://cvc.instituto-camoes.pt/biografias-en/page-2-dp4.html?1=j1IwW&2=j1IwW&3=j1IwW#sigFreeId9bc98a26de   Ficha Técnica | Credits  

Júlio PomarLisboa ¶ 1926       Créditos fotográficos / Photographic credits:Abílio Leitão He studied at the António de Arroio undergraduate school for Decoration Arts, and the two Fine Arts Schools of Lisbon and Porto. He was an exceptional figure on the Portuguese visual arts scene in the second half of the 20th century and began as one of the pioneering advocates of the pictorial neo-realism movement. Some of the icons of his labour can be found in O Gadanheiro (The Harvester, 1945) and O Almoço do Trolha (The Bricklayer's Grub, 1946-50). From these works unto the Ciclo do Arroz (The Rice Cycle, 1952-53), Júlio Pomar developed the notion of an art engaged in political and social affairs, as well as the very image-related paths one could take with such an art, taking into account that this epoch was one of antifascism struggle. ¶ After 1957, feeling that somehow the aesthetic potential of neo-realism was depleted, and under the influence of the gesture-like dynamics of post-war European informalist painting, Pomar's career would swerve into a new direction, towards a progressive lack of distinction of the figures' outlines. It inaugurated a new relationship of tenseness between the figures and the two-dimensionality of the canvas. ¶ In 1963, Pomar moved to Paris, where he began a very plural project: he worked in "assemblages", in paintings with a strong suggestion of motion, and he also introduced in his work an abstracticizing gesture style of calligraphy. In a subsequent phase, he was to engage in more depurated formalisms, exploring well-defined, contrasting colour surfaces, traces of eroticised bodies, and the fragmentary, concealed representation of sex. ¶ The 80s witnessed yet a new phase in Pomar's work, with its gesture motions, explosions even, which create a play between the figures and their biomorphic metamorphoses. The representation of the bodies becomes important at a pictorial fiction level: one can see on Pomar's canvas figures of anthropomorphised animals set in the painting's space as elaborating an assessment of a whole cultural heritage, that is established from the traditions of the oldest narratives to the myths of a historicized Portuguese "essence". ¶ In the 90s, Júlio Pomar mainly reinvented the potential of his own painting, releasing a whole host of animal figures that mingle with the ever-present figuration of the human body, as if tempting the formal limits of its recognition.   View the embedded image gallery online at: http://cvc.instituto-camoes.pt/biografias-en/page-2-dp4.html?1=j1IwW&2=j1IwW&3=j1IwW#sigFreeIdf4243bb8c1   Ficha Técnica | Credits  

Mário Cesariny Lisboa ¶ 1923-2005 ¶ Lisboa     Créditos fotográficos / Photographic credits:Susana Paiva/ Cortesia Assírio & Alvim He was a poet and a painter. His education was diverse: he went through the António Arroio Decorative Arts School course, he studied music with composer Fernando Lopes Graça and attended the Parisian academy La Grande Chaumière. ¶ He is considered the single most important poet of the Portuguese Surrealist movement, being a major influence for the foundation of the Surrealist Group of Lisbon in 1947, the exact same year when he met André Breton in person, which of course would make a mark in his own pictorial and literary career. His restless personality and natural ideological divergences would lead him away from the first group, and form a new one, The Surrealists. On that occasion he wrote the Manifesto Abjeccionista (The Abjectness Manifesto) with fellow writer Pedro Dom. ¶ Cesariny wrote poetry and ever-polemic interventions, put up quite important anthologies, whether of Portuguese or world-class Surrealism, and did translations of Rimbaud, Buñuel and Novalis. ¶ As for his painting, it was in the very early 40s that he first began painting (as well as writing poems and making drawings). After a brief stroll-like passage through neo-realism and the influences of Portuguese poets Cesário Verde and the Futurist Álvaro de Campos, it is in fact in the surrealist school that he finds his own style. However, Cesariny's painting was never a quote-convergent exercise, or an out-performance of the themes, forms and landscapes that make up the usual, hackneyed image of what Surrealism stands for. ¶ In the case of Cesariny's painting, it's impossible to come up with a unified, general theory. As with his poetry, his painting is both spontaneous and subversive, with small whiffs of a magic, dreamlike dimension, with a strong presence of colour, of disorder or even the chaos that is usually associated with the surrealist automatisms and chance methods. The non-sensical and the absurd, so typical a stock-in-trade of the first Avantgardes, are also present in Cesariny's painting, but they're also to be found in his objects and "assemblages". His was a continuously aesthetic experimental approach, whether through the use of less conventional means such as collage and water painting, or through other means. Nonetheless, they all amount to a very coherent visual oeuvre. ¶ As a major advocate and promoter of the surrealist movement in Portugal, it comes as no surprise that Mário Cesariny came to exert powerful influence over several Portuguese artists. The 2002 Grand Prix EDP for the Visual Arts recognized his special contribution to the Portuguese Arts of the 20th century.   View the embedded image gallery online at: http://cvc.instituto-camoes.pt/biografias-en/page-2-dp4.html?1=j1IwW&2=j1IwW&3=j1IwW#sigFreeIdf85f47023d   Ficha Técnica | Credits