Menez Lisboa ¶ 1926 -1995 ¶ Lisboa       Créditos fotográficos / Photographic credits:DR/ Cortesia Galeria III A granddaughter of general Óscar Carmona, Maria Inez Ribeiro da Fonseca began her career as a self-taught artist, having her first exhibitions at the Março Gallery in 1954. ¶ Throughout the 50s, Menez' paintings clearly revealed an influence from the School of Paris, in particular from its penchant for lyricism and poetic reverie. Although at first they were more abstract, figurativism soon became more prominent. But if there was any facet that has been ever-present in her painting, it would be luminosity, expressed through an ethereal, watery chromatism. ¶ As for the 60s, they've witnessed an opening up to pop art and oil painting, which guided Menez to object-painting or object-selecting as her main theme, at a time when she was a recipient of a Gulbenkian Foundation scholarship in London. ¶ Possessor of sensuous, sublimated lines, whether dealing with human faces or abstract surfaces, Menez embraced the creation of a luminous wholeness. Representation itself managed to achieve a spatial effect, in the sense that her paintings carried out the suggestion of placement, of depth-of-field, of an overlaying of level surfaces that remind one of different space typologies: perhaps an open space under daylight, perhaps an inhabitable closed space in the foreground with a long landscape in the background, perhaps even a stage-like space with a "trompe l'oeil" backdrop. ¶ By the end of the 70s, Menez' oeuvre entered yet a new phase. The theatrical traits of its staging and the emergence of characters became paramount, as if in a naïve revisiting of the most crystal-clear of staged fantasies. In the 80s, it would finally reach its iconographical vocation, with a stronger turn towards figurativism. Inspired mainly by the imagetics of the 18th century, Menez recreated the narrational notions of suspension and suggestion, not to mention the intimate, shrewd milieus of the time. However, Menez adds to it a disturbing, almost morbid elegance. Her characters are placed in the gardens and the interiors as signs of a lunar, disaffected presence.   View the embedded image gallery online at: http://cvc.instituto-camoes.pt/biografias-en/page-25-dp4.html?1=j1IwW&2=j1IwW&3=j1IwW#sigFreeIdf3a815e258   Ficha Técnica | Credits  

Miguel Palma Lisboa ¶ 1964     Créditos fotográficos / Photographic credits:Abílio Leitão He works and lives in Sintra, and has been exhibiting regularly since 1988. Mostly installations, his work is inscribed in the tradition of re-appropriation that strongly branded the 90s. The goal thereof was proportionately opposite to the progressive alienation carried out by contemporary production processes. In many of his works, one will realize an almost childlike awe with "doing", also noticeable in the wonderment for materials and for the do-it-yourself poise. Related to these notions, Palma more often than not produces scale models. To him miniaturization and modelling are part of the re-appropriation pulse, charged with a metonymic temperament. Actually, that is the compulsory condition for the existence of a model, the cornerstone of a scientific approach and of the experimental method, on which the author bases his own mode of production. ¶ Miguel Palma discloses an awkwardly uninhabited world, in which the machinic or the systematic are all-pervading and self-sufficient: human involvement is utterly stamped out. One just has to consider a few of his works, from Engenho (Engine, 1993), a craftsmanship car that can be driven through great distances, as the artist himself revealed in its inauguration journey, to Carbono 14 (Carbon 14, 1994), an archaeological section-cut model that displays several pieces of equipment from our own civilization as if buried under consecutive rock strata. This is revisiting that most modern of phantasms, which has not ceased to haunt us: the "bachelor machine". In truth, it is not a machine, but rather a figuration of the inhuman as existential closure. Miguel Palma's installations clear a line of vision to this distressing tension between the materials' burden, the density of things and the automatization of purposes. The work Secretária Ilustrada (The Illustrated Desk, 2003), a desk in whose writing surface a mini-landscape was inserted, acts as the witness of the aforementioned tension, in this particular case disguised as the strain between bureaucracy and the Romantic allure. In 2005 he developed Projecto Ariete, a road trip through Europe and its main museums in a vehicle altered by the artist.     View the embedded image gallery online at: http://cvc.instituto-camoes.pt/biografias-en/page-25-dp4.html?1=j1IwW&2=j1IwW&3=j1IwW#sigFreeIdcda0ab8ba7   Ficha Técnica | Credits                                                

Paulo Nozolino Lisboa ¶ 1955     Créditos fotográficos / Photographic credits:Abílio Leitão Soon after beginning his studies in Painting at the National Society of Fine Arts, he realized that his medium of choice would be photography, and so, between 1975 and 1978, he studied at the London College of Printing. Considered as one of the most important photographers of our times, there were milestones over his 30 years of career with numerous national and international awards and scholarships, such as, for instance, the Kodak Award (Portugal, 1988), the Prix Fondation Leica (France, 1989), the Villa Médicis Hors-les-Murs scholarship (Paris, 1994), and the Grand Prix de la Ville de Vevey (Switzerland, 1995). ¶ Having travelled in Europe, the United States, the North of Africa, the Middle East, India and South America, and having made Paris his home in 1989, and more recently in Porto, it does not come as a surprise that Nozolino's work has become the perfect mirror of his nomadic real-life. Related to this profile of the "road-man", the "traveller", prone to the "dérive" and a self-biographical construction that is nomadic itself, one should add his acuteness where technique and aesthetics are concerned , whether the blacks or the greys that dominate his work. ¶ Nozolino's pictures, which are always black-and-white, are loaded with the profoundest and most dramatic of poeticism, revealing shadows and spaces in which darkness is sovereign. The grain and the aesthetics of his photographs portraying interiors or urban spaces are the reverse to the most comfortable of banalities or the most exotic of elegances of the stereotypes usually reserved for the representations of actual peoples, places or moments as captured by the artist a little all over the world. The emotions gradually radiate from his images, not in any premeditated way, nonetheless insurmountably so. These are images inhabited by children, women, men, faces, gazes, but they're also directly open towards death or sex, bringing about a sense of nostalgia, discomfort, as if we're facing small fragments of a narrative. His photographs do not imply a clear, explicit story, mind you, but mere suggestions of a moment that the artist froze with his piercing gaze, very often revealing a tragic, often stark-naked vision, increasingly so in the last years, as one could notice in his retrospective exhibition Far Cry (Serralves, 2005). ¶ Therefore, one can say that Paulo Nozolino saves us from sleepwalking. Using light to reinforce darkness, the photographer works both to show us the world and to demonstrate the end of a world. The proofs he forwards are the declaration of extinction of those luminous moments.     View the embedded image gallery online at: http://cvc.instituto-camoes.pt/biografias-en/page-25-dp4.html?1=j1IwW&2=j1IwW&3=j1IwW#sigFreeId8ac189279a   Ficha Técnica | Credits  

Pedro CalapezLisboa ¶ 1953     Créditos fotográficos / Photographic credits:Abílio Leitão He studied at the Fine Arts School of Lisbon and become a respected painter in the first half of the 80s through exhibitions such as Depois do Modernismo and Arquipélago (After Modernism and Archipelago). Calapez chose to move away from the quoting vortex and the scatological expression that took by storm the then so-called "return to painting". Instead, he opted for a methodological rigor, in which drawing would become his crucial practice. ¶ Creating paintings by incision making, following closely the engraver's traditional methods, the artist showed a primary interest in the pictorial/architectonic approach to space. Architecture is in fact one of the categorising references for Calapez's oeuvre. However, this architecture, merely scratched over the support's surface, shows us paths, façades, and contradictory vanishing points, generating whimsical landscapes. It is an architecture that is akin to scenography, the way it piles up its elements, and the way in which its final theatrical appearance in fact implies a staging ground. But it is a residual scenography, as it were, left behind by the actors and the narrative and the drama that one past day occupied its area. ¶ Throughout the last decade, Calapez oeuvre's architectonic vocation materialized in the form of works such as Muro contra muro (Wall on Wall, 1994), in which painted panels were erected within the gallery as corridors that directly compelled one to follow a strict path and that set up the conditions of visibility for the spectator. A similar observation-controlling effect was achieved by a recent series of objects: open-ended (lid-less) cubes with painted inner walls appeared like "painting boxes" that imprisoned the space of the visible. ¶ At the same time, the artist developed yet another line of work. His concern for textures and landscape creation is manifested also by an evermore-skilful practice of abstract painting that is completely indulged in its own pleasures of paint applying and colour management. More often than not, these paintings are presented as panels, which, by gathering multiple elements in a way that they occupy a whole wall, once again establish a privileged dialogue with the space and the light that accommodate it.     View the embedded image gallery online at: http://cvc.instituto-camoes.pt/biografias-en/page-25-dp4.html?1=j1IwW&2=j1IwW&3=j1IwW#sigFreeIde2f8198a3c   Ficha Técnica | Credits  

Pedro Portugal Castelo Branco ¶ 1963     Créditos fotográficos / Photographic credits:Abílio Leitão Before his artistic career, he studied civil engineering, but he was still a student at the Fine Arts School of Lisbon when he became co-founder of the Homeostético movement. ¶ His first individual exhibition was in 1985, the year he finished his painting course. At this exhibition he presented small oil and pastel paintings, already pregnant with a figurative stylising code or, more generically, a signal system that is reportable to comics and cartoons. Coming close to graphics as these is not an indication of spontaneity or any kind of lenience of execution; quite the contrary, it is a route through a meticulous composition effort, with an unwavering use of a perfected play of contrasts and symmetries. Pedro Portugal is, in fact, not just a painter, he is a cultural "agitator". ¶ By the end of the 80s his work became more ample and explicit in as far as its critical commentary was concerned. It focused on the artistic, cultural, social and political state of affairs. As a prime example of the works under this general concept, one should identify the eucalyptus planted upside-down in Lisbon airport's main roundabout, in 1991. ¶ Throughout the 90s, the artist's horizon became more diversified in terms of workable materials. One could witness an emphasis on installations that were created for very specific purposes. In terms of social intentions, it funneled down to ecological concerns and political criticism. And, finally, in terms of his own activities' modes of divulgation, he supported the foundation of artists' associations and other structures of research and transmission of thought. ¶ An important point to this concept is Pedro Portugal's adoption of computer-based painting, in which the composition exists in a digital virtual reality and whose real execution is put in the hands of its spectators, who become active in the work's creation. Thus, the artist dedicates himself in a multifaceted way to the ever-present question of the end of painting and of its aesthetic, cultural tradition that is usually associated to painting. He questions at one and the same time the very possibility of art today and its immediate social role.     View the embedded image gallery online at: http://cvc.instituto-camoes.pt/biografias-en/page-25-dp4.html?1=j1IwW&2=j1IwW&3=j1IwW#sigFreeId1d012edeac   Ficha Técnica | Credits  

Michael BibersteinSuíça ¶ 1948       Créditos fotográficos / Photographic credits:Abílio Leitão He established himself in Portugal in the late 70s. Since then he has had a full-fledged career, quite noticeably in Portugal, but also abroad. ¶ When he first began painting, around the mid-70s, Biberstein gave preference to a reductionist approach, in which representation was limited to a mere few abstract elements. He explored the meaningful potential of subtle variations with these elements. ¶ At the same time, this method was applied to the exhibiting space itself, and painting would become thus one element among many in an installation. Throughout the 70s, the artist would dedicate himself to the research of the very constitutive elements of the act of painting, both formally and conceptually, and he displaced them from an implicit plane to an explicit one. ¶ Although only fully and plainly expressed at a later stage, this goal was already present in his research into how the representation processes are prone to lead to a transcendent change in the beholder's state of mind. However, it is a paradoxical goal, for it puts what one could call the spiritual efficiency of visual forms through a systematic analysis. ¶ Biberstein's works left this analytical attitude behind by the mid-80s, and moved towards a psychological approach of the viewer. By making landscape painting his primary theme, the artist questions notions of Beauty and Sublimity, and aims at an auratic reception of the work of art that is built upon the visible/invisible dichotomy, which he masters very skillfully. ¶ As in a crossbreeding of the Faustian tradition of Romantic landscaping and the stylizing influence of Eastern scroll painting, the author creates huge, melancholic-ridden landscapes tinted with an ineffable Wagnerian minimalism. By bringing to his own contemporary world these two traditions of landscape painting, the Romantic and the Chinese, Biberstein also carries over to his own time the possibility of transcending the artistic object. ¶ Thoughout the 90s, Biberstein's painting explored the common grounds of landscape and abstract painting, arriving at an ever-systematic, intricate management of colour. This has become the true protagonist of his most recent canvases.     View the embedded image gallery online at: http://cvc.instituto-camoes.pt/biografias-en/page-25-dp4.html?1=j1IwW&2=j1IwW&3=j1IwW#sigFreeIda7b0610cd5   Ficha Técnica | Credits  

Paula RegoLisboa ¶ 1935       Créditos fotográficos / Photographic credits:Jane Brown/ Cortesia Malborough Fine Art, London She studied at St. Julian's college in Estoril, Portugal, and in 1952 she moved to London, fleeing away from the grey days of Salazar's regime. There, she entered the Slade School of Art and later on married painter Victor Willing. She would proceed to become one of the most respected artists in both the United Kingdom and Portugal. ¶ Paula Rego's works from the 50s are quite close to realistic codes, but a certain attention to odd details and its rough, crude gesture of painting are already visible and prized, as well as a certain virulent relationship with reality that protracts her choice for a fantasy universe, which sometimes seems to be a dreadful one. ¶ In the 60s her work achieves a stronger freedom and drive. The energy explosion provided by art brut meets a new mode of expression in collage, through which the artists tamed that very same energy in a more complex manner, given the fact it allows the intertwining of multiple effects, and more systematic as well, for it implies a selection that imposes its own specific rhythm. ¶ In the early 80s Paula Rego abandons collage and resumes her technique of drawing directly on the canvas, underpinning the freshness and the immediacy of her figures, and at the same time exercising a very peculiar mode of composition, in a carrousel-like deportment that make her paintings more and more lofty, but at the same time almost giddy. The main trait of this phase is the multiplication of characters and actions that fill up the canvas. ¶ In the middle of that decade, the author began another phase, in which the narrative became more rigorous, instead of the previous dispersion. Her new paintings, presenting a unity of time and space, not to mention a unity of action, became more dense, weighty, and more painting-like, discarding thus their prior more graphic nature. In the same way, they became more committed to the bodies' volume and the perspective of the surrounding spaces. ¶ Generally speaking, the central themes of Paula Rego's images are stories that only she knows entirely, but that are revealed to us at one particular, dramatic point, made clear by whatever the artist chooses, in any given example: the characters, the situation, or the whole scenography. ¶ Looking back on it in its entirety, we can look upon Rego's oeuvre as an obsessive exploration of the same theme: relationships as power relationships and power relationships as staged perversities.     View the embedded image gallery online at: http://cvc.instituto-camoes.pt/biografias-en/page-25-dp4.html?1=j1IwW&2=j1IwW&3=j1IwW#sigFreeId9790fecf55   Ficha Técnica | Credits  

Pedro Cabrita ReisLisboa ¶ 1956       Créditos fotográficos / Photographic credits:Abílio Leitão Pedro Cabrita Reis studied at the Fine Arts School of Lisbon and since the early 80s has established himself as a painter and exhibited regularly. Throughout the entire span of his career, Cabrita Reis never abandoned painting, especially if one takes into account the questioning of the geometric abstract painting traditions with which he has engaged and often revisited, in the past recent years, with his immense painting-objects that seem to converge several of the thematic lines of his whole course. He also kept up the practice of drawing, always in a figurative line of work, and with a very special commitment to self-portraits, of which he made several series. However, it is through the sculpture and installation areas of creation that Cabrita Reis would find, in the very early 90s, the path to his full-fledged national consecration and a large international recognition. This became evident through his participation in events such as Metropolis (Berlin, Germany, 1991), Documenta IX (Kassel, Germany, 1992), and the São Paulo (1994) and Venice (1997) biennials. ¶ If at the outset his work was based fundamentally on subjectivity and memory, increasingly it approached formal asceticism and minimalism. From the scenic sensibility of his late 80s work to the clinical rigour of the mid-90s, one can witness a progressive dehumanisation and a poetic and metaphoric dispossession, connected to the contrasting growing affection for architecture-like effects and grand scales. ¶ The Cidades Cegas (Blind Cities) that he began to "build" in the late 90s are not only blind, but silent as well. Resisting metaphorical readings, they elude any pigeonholing in terms of meaning. It is as if the artist has drawn a path from memory to matter. In fact, his work has always shown the physical evidence of the employed materials and construction processes. However, in its first steps, his matter seemed to be matter inhabited by metaphor, if not haunted by it. ¶ Rooting metaphysics deeply into anthropology, it was this very metaphoric condition that bridged the individual to the collective, the arbitrary to the fatidic. The devaluation of the metaphor stood for the preference for insight in the detriment of complexity. If one entered Cabrita Reis's installation created for the 2003 Venice biennial, one would notice the powerful presence of light, which came about as the precise reverse of the driving urges that had guided most of Reis's work until then and were present at other installations, such as Contra a Claridade (Against Clarity, done years before, in 1994, for the CAMJAP).     View the embedded image gallery online at: http://cvc.instituto-camoes.pt/biografias-en/page-25-dp4.html?1=j1IwW&2=j1IwW&3=j1IwW#sigFreeIdce4b10644a   Ficha Técnica | Credits  

Pedro CasqueiroLisboa ¶ 1959       Créditos fotográficos / Photographic credits:Abílio Leitão He graduated at the Fine Arts School of Lisbon, and it was already in the very early 80s, when he was still a student, that he began exhibiting his first works. Rather than any theoretical or ideological standpoint, it is clear from his early work that he stresses a visual approach to painting. If references are found in his work, they're not clad in the guise of quotes or commentaries, but rather appear as pretexts for the development of dynamic displacements, multiplications and recompositions of visual elements. This is not a question of achieving a sort of synthesis model of great depuration and coldness, aloof from any kind of critical questioning. Quite the contrary, it's an inclination towards the use of several models at one time, within a logic of multiplication and complexification. ¶ At first, the employment of several graphic and composition solutions guided Casqueiro's painting to a true visual explosion, particularly because of the way he juxtaposes and contrasts colours and spaces. ¶ Between the late 80s and early 90s his painting became somewhat more jovial, with accurately designed surfaces, usually monochromatic backgrounds over which the customary juxtapositions take place, and in which the forms are organized or placed according to rhythmic patterns. ¶ From the mid-90s onwards, an architecture-like rigor is established, if not a geometrical simplification, in open disparity to the immediately previous mannerist flurry. And, more recently, Casqueiro has returned to a graphic and figurative referential linkage, sometimes close to comics but always according to his own personal rhythm of composition. ¶ As the most general trait of his oeuvre, one should highlight the permanent duplication of spaces, focused on a capacity to recombine two-dimensional spaces with three-dimensional suggestions or to crossbreed, as it were, abstract with figurative spaces. ¶ As in a virtual setting, space becomes a character itself, a character whose heartbeat is sensed according to the spectator's intensity of attention.     View the embedded image gallery online at: http://cvc.instituto-camoes.pt/biografias-en/page-25-dp4.html?1=j1IwW&2=j1IwW&3=j1IwW#sigFreeId0d202bbd65   Ficha Técnica | Credits  

Pedro ProençaAngola ¶ 1962     Créditos fotográficos / Photographic credits:Abílio Leitão Due to his very peculiar style of drawing and his extraordinary verve, he became an artist with a strongly rooted presence in Portugal, one of the most active of his generation. In 1982, when he co-founded the Homeostético movement, he was still studying at the Fine Arts School of Lisbon. Proença was the writer of most of the movement's manifestos. His own burgeoning individual career would, however, begin in 1984. ¶ In Proença's oeuvre, drawing is primary, underlined by both a meticulous graphic technique and an unrestricted imagination. Proença's figurativism is metamorphic, expansive, and ornamental. Firstly, it is metamorphic for, by using human, animal and plant forms, he constructs via rhythms, perversions and deformations that transform the ones into the others. His drawings seem to be deprived of both a beginning and an end, scattering in all possible directions like climbing plants, to the point where they can take up the whole exhibition space. In this sense they are very similar to site-specific installations. The very fact that space can be gobbled up entirely allows us to refer to its ornamental facet or vocation, which is only reinforced by the motifs Proença chooses to use in the drawings, as well as by his own deft virtuoso skills. ¶ As a very atypical revisiting of the Baroque in contemporary art, Pedro Proença's whole work stands as a restless illustration of that historical style's premises, namely, the excessive formality that leaves no room for narrative organization. It is a manifestation of non-sense, a manifestation that combines paradoxically an erudite attitude on the one hand and on the other a very playful ingredient. ¶ The ampleness of Proença's references - from visual arts, literary and mythological sources - asseverates the multiplicity of the levels of cultural interpretation. Consequently, to cope with this diversity of fragments, allusions and recurring ideas becomes like a promise - always deferred - of its possible readability. Still, all the references are processed according to a particular rhythm and humour that have become the trademark of the author, in which one finds echoes from other popular arts such as naïve art, comics or children's drawings.     View the embedded image gallery online at: http://cvc.instituto-camoes.pt/biografias-en/page-25-dp4.html?1=j1IwW&2=j1IwW&3=j1IwW#sigFreeId93a2379c1c   Ficha Técnica | Credits