Untitled

CINEMATOGRAPHIC DRAWINGS
Deep within Portuguese modernism, around the magazine Presença, the figure of Júlio dos Reis Pereira (or of his literary pseudonym, Saúl Dias) occupies a central position – like that of his brother, José Régio, the founder of the magazine, with Branquinho da Fonseca and João Gaspar Simões. Yet his work is better known due to the late paintings from the series Poeta, which were greatly influenced by the overseeing figure of Marc Chagall. However, when one looks back into his artistic past we come across expressionist painting and drawing close to George Grosz.
The drawings belonging to the Colecção da Caixa Geral de Depósitos are from this period, and in them there is a fluid figuration done in Indian ink which constructs a gallery of characters who correspond to stereotypes. However, their caricatural nature is countered by the complexity and violence of the spaces, in a view of the fragmented city that in some cases seems to come close to the spaces of Walter Röhrig in German expressionist cinema.
This cinematographic dimension to his drawings at the end of the twenties and early thirties marks a path that was not followed enough in Portuguese art before World War II, and thus signals the rare place that his more interesting and lively expression possessed in drawing.

Delfim Sardo