René Bertholo Alhandra ¶ 1935-2005 ¶ Vila Nova da Cacela       Créditos fotográficos / Photographic credits:Elna Voss-Hellwig/ Cortesia Galeria Fernando Santos Between 1951 and 1957, he attended the Fine Arts School of Lisbon, but his strong inclination towards experimentalism curtailed a more linear course of events. In 1957, Bertholo moves to Munich, Germany, and in the following year to Paris, where he'll settle and live along with Lourdes Castro. It is in France that he begins his paintings of more abstract features, which will progressively admit the introduction of Neofigurativism-versed exercises, as well as Informalist-influenced experiences that are still affiliated to the psychic automatisms of the Surrealism movement. Another important event of these initial Paris-based years is his dedication to the publication of the KWY magazine (1958-1963). ¶ From the 60s onwards, the personal aesthetics of René Bertholo becomes defined through a playful deportment, an almost do-it-yourself attitude in which objects and small figures inhabit the pictorial space, in an assemblage dimension constantly restored. ¶ In 1966-67 his first Modelos Reduzidos (Reduced Models) are created. These are mechanic objects that transform some of Bertholo's most common figurative symbols (such as the tree or the cloud) into something with real motion, thanks to small motors that are equally shown in the visible plane of the work. As a result, the artist is questioning the very object/process condition of the work of art, which was an absolutely innovative stance where Portuguese modern art was concerned. Motivated by his Berlin studies through the 70s, Bertholo would create a series of "sound machines" - that edited and reedited daily life sounds - with which such questionings, previously only hinted at, would become more deeply analysed. ¶ After 1974 his painting becomes slightly accentuated where the miniature figuration is concerned: it becomes inscribed in a more narrative plane, where the pictorial emerges from the allegorical definition of the plural space of a room, and therefore as the image of a very peculiar kind of staged comics scene. The process of constantly reusing and reassembling the previously exhibited figures and objects would only increase in the last few years, when he starts to make use of graphic computation, which if on the one hand helps him in his own stylistic resources also confirms on the other hand the favourite figurativism that was always charged with some autobiographical references.   View the embedded image gallery online at: http://cvc.instituto-camoes.pt/biografias-en/page-3-dp3.html?1=j1IwW#sigFreeId9cb99fbb58 Ficha Técnica | Credits  

Rui Chafes Lisboa ¶ 1956       Créditos fotográficos / Photographic credits:Abílio Leitão He completed his sculpture course at the Fine Arts School of Lisbon, and began his exhibition career in the second half of the 80s. In his first individual exhibitions, Chafes presented sculptures/constructions that literally occupied the whole of the show rooms, engaged completely in scale subversion and even in going beyond the exhibiting space. With meaningful disparities in the used materials (trunks and canes, HDF flakes, wood strips, plastic), in light and colour, the experience of forms was reaffirmed, forms whose organic, primitive origin is deduced and whose dynamics of growth and outburst hamper any kind of stable atmosphere, and are not able to imprison its existence within a protective cocoon. However, a certain tendency to the delimitation of the forms was already perceptible, and it is its development that would become his future, disciplined course as a sculptor. ¶ By the end of the 80s, he stills presents organic-suggestive forms, as if we were facing shells of the dead-born or the prostheses of crumbling humanoid machines, but in the last year of the decade he exclusively creates black-painted iron pieces, which becomes his stock-in-trade afterwards. ¶ In the work produced in the 90s, the most outstanding trait is his formal austerity and restraint, presiding over the creation of objects based on method-driven, rigorous drawings, and constructed along strict rules of symmetry and balance. In successive series of sculptures than often remind one of invocation places (habitation, contention, annihilation) for absent bodies, the sense of order exists in tandem with the evocation of violence, through the forms that resemble weapons and aggressions, and whose dimension of organic convulsion, despite its apparent coldness, imply a strongly felt physical and sensorial allure. ¶ In the last years, the artist has produced works of a grand scale, very often in dialog with the natural or architectural spaces in which they're exhibited. As paradigms for this phase, one should mention the large exhibition of his works at the Pena Palace and at the Natural Park of Sintra and works presented in the Netherlands and Belgium.     View the embedded image gallery online at: http://cvc.instituto-camoes.pt/biografias-en/page-3-dp3.html?1=j1IwW#sigFreeId23470e9c17   Ficha Técnica | Credits  

Rui Toscano Lisboa ¶ 1970     Créditos fotográficos / Photographic credits:Abílio Leitão He studied painting and sculpture at Ar.Co and at the Fine Arts School of Porto. He had his first exhibitions in 1993 while still a student. At the same time he carried out his work as a visual artist, he sought out other creative undertakings, namely music and video jamming, and he became a member of several bands (such as the Tone Scientists) that had great impact on the domestic cultural scene. ¶ The author has revealed a great capacity in terms of exploring the most disparate of media, from drawing to multimedia installations, thus also revealing a creative power - in the classical sense of the word - albeit channelled through an obvious post-modern attitude. Before anything else, Rui Toscano is someone with a very clear understanding of contemporary experience and its related technologies. At the core of such an understanding lies the notion of a contemplation state that dispenses with the formerly related notion of interiority, and outright dismisses the individual. Consequently, attention from the part of the spectator no longer needs to imply any sort of intention. ¶ In works such as Infinity (2001), a video-landscape of the city of São Paulo projected on a cutout of the word INFINITY, Rio 09 May 2001 (2002), yet another video-landscape, this time around of Rio de Janeiro, My Bloody Valentine (2000) and The accelerating Collision of Future and Past in the Post-Modern Era (1997), Rui Toscano shows this new contemplation state as something with an alienating effect. This is the symptom of a technological sublime that was imposed on the individual in the true sense of the word, and it is in that sense that Rui Toscano becomes actually the most romantic of artists, given the fact he acknowledges his own romantic urges within his original radicalism (as in One hundred over the rainbow, 2000), precisely at a time when romanticism can only emerge as a sort of nostalgic projection of oneself. In T (1998), a self-portrait as a letter of the alphabet, or in Black Painting-Perfect Lovers (1997), the very notion of an "I" - an instance of introversion - externalises itself as an automatism. In the end of The Foyer Affair (2001), in which Rui Toscano appears as a film noir gangster, for example, he smokes a cigarette and fades to blue.     View the embedded image gallery online at: http://cvc.instituto-camoes.pt/biografias-en/page-3-dp3.html?1=j1IwW#sigFreeId2bcfa689f0   Ficha Técnica | Credits  

Rigo Madeira ¶ 1966     Créditos fotográficos / Photographic credits:Abílio Leitão The artist, whose full name is Ricardo Gouveia, emigrated to San Francisco, United States, in 1985, where he consolidated a very consistent artistic career whose motivation is quite alien to the Portuguese national context. Graduating from the San Francisco Art Institute, in a multicultural environment with strong underground and Hispanic references, the rhetoric that underlies his work is aimed at an ethnic affirmation that was never experienced by Portuguese society. The span of his work covers several territories, from comics to painting, but he focused mainly on public art, especially with mural painting and interventions in urban spaces, some of which were created with strong bonds to the local Hispanic community and with a clear-cut political agenda, such as One Tree (1995), at San Francisco's downtown. ¶ Throughout the last decade, his political stance has become also manifest due to the artist's connection, both artistically and personally, with Robert King, who was imprisoned for thirty years, and with Leonard Peltier, a Native American leader, both of whom Rigo considers to be political prisoners. ¶ Yet another cultural shock came about in Taiwan, where he travelled to in 1997, and where he developed a new series of works that widened once again Rigo's spectrum of cultural geography. ¶ In a moment when multiculturalism seems to be in the order of the day in all aesthetical and ideological debates throughout the world, it becomes rather enticing to follow a course in which one finds the mark of several peripheries and of successive distantiations and displacements. In 1994, at the Porta 33 gallery, in Funchal, Madeira, in an exhibition titled Largo do Canto do Muro (Plaza of the Wall's Corner), Rigo covered the floor with Portuguese cobblestone work whose pattern was close to that of a stylised sea, and upon which he wrote the names of many places and streets of Madeira's island. ¶ The ensemble of the artist's work was presented for the first time in Portugal in an remarkable exhibition curated by Manray Hsu in 2006, at the Centro das Artes Casa das Mudas, at Calheta, Madeira. Also in 2006, that same exhibition was adapted to the ZDB gallery, in Lisbon: Nada de Novo / Swim Again was curated by Manray Hsu and Natxo Checa, and it also included a series of urban interventions all over the city, some of which with a permanent character, such as the Europa Latina mural at the 24 de Julho Avenue.     View the embedded image gallery online at: http://cvc.instituto-camoes.pt/biografias-en/page-3-dp3.html?1=j1IwW#sigFreeId725ef6f6a2   Ficha Técnica | Credits  

Rui Sanches Lisboa ¶ 1954       Créditos fotográficos / Photographic credits:Abílio Leitão After a brief passage through Ar.Co, he pursued his education at the Goldsmiths College and Yale. One of the visible traits of his work that can be traced to his education is the Deconstructivist influence that swayed the international scene at the time. ¶ When Sanches held his first exhibition in 1984, he began what would be a long and systematic oeuvre of deconstructing Neo-Classical paintings, which he chose as his references for work. For instance, (Poussin's) Et in Arcadia Ego holds a very special place in his career and in the construction of his visual language. ¶ In the works he created throughout the 80s there is a predominance of the so-called "box games": rectangles, parallelepipeds, cubes and beacons are the shapes that seem to build up the basic structure of each piece. But as soon as that "base" is completed, the whole of the work of art suffers a process of dispossession and weightlessness. The boxes are always "hollow" and their function is mainly combinatory. The key aspect is that they form a surface modelling and direct the spectator's gaze, the elements in fact that determine the performance of the work of art. ¶ The aforementioned processes of dispossession and weightlessness are underpinned and intensified by a thorough research on curve shapes, connecting canals, waving surfaces, fluid matters, transparent bodies... elements that represent fluxes and guarantee a certain degree of inner tension and motion on the works of art. ¶ With his exhibition Body Building (1992), the author stepped away from quoting and deconstructing previously existing references. On the contrary, it was the sensuality and the physicality of human bodies that became clearer and it was his material of election, wood, that allowed the artist to make the most of elements modelled in such a way that they became suggestive of organic shapes. ¶ However, up until now one acknowledges a permanent and recurring dialectics in his work between an analytical drive and an organic penchant. The structural concern is manifested in more geometrical pieces that have as priority to establish a dialogue with architecture, with space and with the shapes of its representation. As far as the more organic pieces, they bring to the fore a choreography of violence in which the body is manifested as something excessive where geometry and representation are concerned.     View the embedded image gallery online at: http://cvc.instituto-camoes.pt/biografias-en/page-3-dp3.html?1=j1IwW#sigFreeIdfeb8ed9a02   Ficha Técnica | Credits  

Vasco AraújoLisboa ¶ 1975     Créditos fotográficos / Photographic credits:Abílio Leitão He graduated in Sculpture at the Fine Arts School of Lisbon, and also completed the Advanced Visual Arts course at the Maumaus school. In his infant yet compelling career, he was awarded with the New Artists EDP Award (2002), and he was a Core Program resident in the Museum of Fine Arts of Houston (2003-2004) and the University of Arts Philadelphia (2007). Among the artists of his generation, he is one of the most internationalised, with participations in the 2002 Sidney and the 2005 Venice biennials. ¶ Having installation, often with integrated video, as his main field of action, he also employs a given appropriate object, photography or text, more often than not in a dialogue between text and sound. Many of his works have Opera as its particular reference; music, often worked under diverse manners, is a decisive component of his creation. Himself an Opera singer, the artist uses visual narratives as the central axis of his creative process, a play between the real and the fictitious, sound and silence, the feminine and the masculine, the intimate and the social. Whether metaphors of personal dramas (La Stupenda, 2001) or games of seduction (Dilema, 2004), his are works that question identity and fate, problematizing thus human condition and communication. In an attitude close to a heteronymic playfulness, the author personifies himself some of his characters, sometimes recurring to cross-dressing (Diva-a portrait, 2000, and Duettino, 2002), bringing to the public arena the issue of communicability and opening up a conception of art (and reality itself) as a product of a super-stage direction. The references to the Baroque period and the very scenographic dimension of Vasco Araújo's work become quite evident in installations such as Dilema (Serralves, 2004), with portraits of the artist interpreting the language of handfans, or Recital (2002), in which he recreates the ambient of a concerto room that functions as a structural analysis of the several instances of meaning that are constituted by the images, voices, sounds and texts from the operatic spectacle. In more recent works (The Girl of the Golden West, O Jardim, The Garden), the analysis of issues such as the communication and the confrontation between social roles becomes even more politicized, pointing towards other themes, as those of multiculturalism and post-colonialism. In 2006, he was in the shortlist for the BES Photo Award.     View the embedded image gallery online at: http://cvc.instituto-camoes.pt/biografias-en/page-3-dp3.html?1=j1IwW#sigFreeId80dfd5edd5   Ficha Técnica | Credits