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BARTLEBY
“I am on a very high pedestal, clap and let me go home alone”, commented Mário Cesariny towards the end of his life, when public recognition weighed heavy on him, not without a certain discreet pleasure. His career had been very long when he died at home on the 26th of November 2006. He had written many books, and made many compilations of texts, manifestos and, above all, poetry. He was extremely active around the area of surrealism, a political and poetic weapon he discovered in 1947 in his contact in Paris with André Breton, whose life he would take as a way of being.
Mário Cesariny de Vasconcelos’ career has been duly described, inventoried and argued over. It has already been catalogued and honoured with commendations. At the depths of his course, specifically in his artistic work (if one can separate it from his poetic activity), there shines a light that is born out of a creativity that is distant from any idea of the virtuoso. He was interested in the process, the loss of control, the inventing of little working disciplines that provided results in which the random occupied a determined place. In the cadavre exquis he carried out with other artists and companions in art, in the seismo-figures drawn to the rhythm of the jerking movements of trams, in the breathed-figures spilt on paper – in all of these things there is always the same will to allow something to happen beyond the tyranny of awareness, previous to artistic reason and, therefore, perhaps more profound.
This rejection of the systematic, the plan, the map, the proficiency of the hand, the acrobatic dexterity of the gesture is what draws out the continuum of what he called surrealism.
Beyond the groups and his friendships with Alexandre O’Neill, Fernando de Azevedo, Marcelino Vespeira, António Pedro and José-Augusto França (firstly), or with Cruzeiro Seixas, Pedro Oom, António Maria Lisboa, Carlos Calvet, Mário-Henrique Leiria (secondly, and after breaking off from the first ones), Cesariny followed a solitary path.
He often gave up (playing piano, writing), as if Melville’s Bartleby was his example. “I would prefer not to”, seems to echo in many ways throughout his frail, intense and often vibrant path.

Delfim Sardo