Amor à italiana

I PAINT PAINTINGS BY LETTERS
It is vain, this love Italian style. Seen in the mirror, being reflected and thus inverted, then double inverted. There is a voyeuristic side to this narcissistic fascination, just as there is an erotic side to what is suggested in these inversions, in the subtle metaphors that our imagination might build.
In 1971, on the cover of the first issue of the magazine Colóquio Artes, which the Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian published for a hundred and eleven issues, there was a painting by João Vieira, dated close to this Amor à italiana. This was Uma rosa é, from 1968, a painting that referred to Gertrude Stein and her poem “A rose is a rose is a rose is”. A fascination for words – and for this circular poem – seems to flow through all of Vieira’s work. He himself said that his greatest influence was Cesário Verde and that the idea for the paintings of words, letters and numbers that he started in the sixties had been born out of a passion for Cesário Verde, the most pictorial of the Portuguese poets: “I paint paintings by letters, by signs”, a line taken literally, and which is at the origin of a work constructed around words.
His course, however, goes beyond the field of painting, both in his participation in the KWY group (with Lourdes Castro, René Bertholo, Costa Pinheiro, Christo, Jan Voss and José Escada), as well as in his sculptures – also of letters – installations or performances.
Amor à italiana stands, in the certainty of its gesture, in the irony of its title and this double inversion, as one of João Vieira’s greatest works, between the visual poem and painting, between the game and the spectator’s attention.
One question hangs in the air on looking at this painting: where is its erotic game? In the literal nature of its title, or in our imagination?
A double inversion, however, is always the same in a different way.

Delfim Sardo