René Bertholo

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.

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