Palmeiras

THE LITTLE WORLDS
The palm trees that stir inside the box are moved by fans which are connected by an archaic but efficient system and capture the outside wind – converted into electric energy and reconverted into wind energy. On its toy scale, the model that is the work of art replicates the world, in a coming and going between reality and fiction turned into an almost-children’s-game.
René Bertholo’s models are among the very, very few examples in Portugal of a playful art. They are marvellous in their devices, and seem to have been produced by a pop art Geppetto, an engineer of insignificances that move a powerful imaginary.
Bertholo was a member of the KWY group, and began these reduced models (as he called them) in 1966, starting from apparently rudimentary mechanics – yet so personal that even today it is difficult to recuperate some of these models – which animated small landscapes, idiosyncratic microcosms.
His little mechanical poetry was situated in a cross between the French nouveaux réalistes, whom he met in Paris (and with whom he mixed) and a world experience close to Joseph Cornell. It was on this irreducibly personal path that he constructed the several different moments of his work, which is close to literature and biography and is always guided by a compulsion to produce images. That’s what imagination is about.

Delfim Sardo