Lothario’s Guide

In «Cartilha do Marialva» [Primer of the Marialva], Júlio Pomar constructs a critical and ironic portrait of the figure of the marialva - the bohemian bourgeois, heir to privilege, lover of wine, fado and nightlife, who imagines himself the guardian of noble values while living in a constant mismatch between discourse and practice. As José Cardoso Pires described him, he is the «fidalgo, boémio e estoura-vergas» [nobleman, bohemian and rake].

More than a moral critique, Pomar is interested in the poetic dimension of this figure. The marialva’s “primer” is made up of gestures, habits and excesses, lived intensely through the body and everyday life. To paint the marialva is to reveal this ambiguous poetry, built layer upon layer, with no clearly defined beginning or end.

The painting emerges as a process of accumulation and erosion of matter, where time, history and experience condense. Behind the aristocratic pose, the truth of an ordinary man appears - contradictory and human, whose nobility reveals itself more through naivety than through coherence.