Untitled

SKINDEEP
In the nineteen sixties the Portuguese city of Évora was a meeting point for a group of very young artists who were very aware of the art of their time and sought out new paths among the many opened up between pop and psychedelic art, new directions between figuration and abstraction. These young artists, who would open up the doors for a second generation made up of José Carvalho and José Conduto, were Joaquim Bravo, Álvaro Lapa and António Palolo.
António Palolo began his career very early, at the age of sixteen, and held his first solo exhibition in the Galeria 111 in Lisbon in 1964 at the age of eighteen. This precocious aspect was very common in the artists of his generation: Fernando Calhau started at eighteen and Vítor Pomar at sixteen.
The works in Palolo’s early years already displayed attention concerning the structure of the surface in compositions coming close to pop – or rather, to the version of pop that he knew through the mediation of António Areal, often in hypothetical dialogues with Warhol or Rauschenberg. His drawings were line and plane structure, often with the introduction of calligraphy, which prefigured the dichotomy that his pictorial work would always have, involving long periods of geometric constructions – which then gave way to large-scale formal constructions, in reticules or colour fields – and then others, in which the human form (or the body, in the broader sense) was his subject.
In the end it would be the more geometrical aspect that would prevail in his work as a whole, also because it would become the support for a more subtle work on the colour, transparency and epidermis of the canvas. This was a rare conjugation in Portugal, where examples of sophisticated colourist painters are scant. That quality of sparkle in the colour of the painting in the last phase of his life seems to prove Almada Negreiros’s thesis that a great painter only gets better with time. Palolo’s work at the end of the eighties comes back to the geometrical shapes that had been present in the sixties, yet add great vigour to them; they are constructed towards a progressive dryness, with a precise, large scale, maintaining dialogue with the history of painting since the fifties, with flourishes of Pollock, Agnes Martin or, in the final zone of his work, of Sean Scully or Brice Marden.
Yet this cultured aspect of his painting is never allowed to sink into a mere web of quotations because the sensitivity of the chromatic work and the velour of the surface (achieved through the acrylic going through a silicon emulsion) makes each painting an aesthetically precise moment.
António Palolo was a rare painter because in his work quotation and reference are indiscernible from the defining of a poetic view of his own. And that is not a theoretical quality; it is a visible practice.

Delfim Sardo