A panorama of Portuguese art

Kultur – 1962 from 1962, is the first approach to what would be the most extensive and perhaps characteristic production of Joaquim Rodrigo. Rodrigo mixed the four major colours of his already defined theory (red, yellow, white and black) on an ochre background, inscribing some signs with the same colours, filling in areas or designing their outlines.

This work alludes to the academic crisis lived during 1962 that culminated in an invasion of the university campus by police and the principal’s subsequent resignation. Once again, an episode taken from national political life, that has only been recognised now, was registered by a painting that hereby enlarged its domain of the world and the natural diversity of events that composes a time.

The figuration is schematic and synthetic and makes use of topographic outlines, strictly adhering to the two-dimensional elements already familiar from Rodrigo’s earlier work. Narrative is also present and infers an articulation of the visual signs arranged in isolation on the plane. The affinities with cartography are clear and constitute our understanding of Joaquim Rodrigo’s painting from this phase, which reveals an arrangement of small perceptions coupled to a movement, a journey, or more generally a part of a journey.

The landscape, which inevitably refers to a whole, disappears within a field of multiple forces that constitute the perceptions that the painter cartographs as incidents, isolated in their singularity, but seemingly carried along by the constantly inferred movement. The signs suggest different colours, organised in strict connection with their distribution within the perpendicular layout, that define an absolute here and and now from which the dimensions of space and time created by the painting unfold.

The initials in the title of this piece cipher the name of Santa Maria, a liner that was highjacked by Henrique Galvão to draw the attention of the international community to the political situation in Portugal. This painting initiates a new moment in Portuguese art.

This episode is narrated by signs arranged within a strict orthogonal grid and have been orchestrated onto an agitated watery-green background where the optical centre corresponds to the centre of the painting. Rodrigo uses three primary colours over the background in shapes that have been drawn in elevation, plan or cross-section, rendering an efficient synthesis of information.

The image assumes a signifying value that enables the painting to function like the writing or narrative of episodes, marking the painting as a register that lies open to the world and its contingencies. Graphic signs are jumbled with other visual signs in articulation with the written pictographic dimension of Joaquim Rodrigo’s work.

Os amorosos by Rolando Sá Nogueira is an ironic and disperse evocation. This painting reveals the contradictions aroused within Portuguese culture and society between the new ways dictated to by development and consumption – adopted by art - and the persistence of traditional moral and ideological values. Accessories, leftovers from contemporary life and postcards, with a fin-de-siècle touch, denounce the hypocritical approach of sexuality at the time.

Idyllic love relations are ridiculed by the disparagement, association and transferral of the photographic image and the relations of juxtaposed and cumulative disorder of diverse fragments from different sources and pictorial elements. Gestural and expressive in character, this order is proximate to that of artists Rauschenberg and Kitaj.

The letter, instead of writing, affirms itself as a sign on the white page. But the gesture is what has been given to us to be read. The action of the body during the process of production adds a performative dimension to João Vieira's painting. The gesture concentrates itself on the stain, no longer a trace in the wide and firm wake of the spatula. An accentuated material consistency confers the gesture a monumental appearance and erects it as a formal presence.

The letters are chromatically isolated, like autonomous signs that have reached their limit. They are the plastic elements that organise and rhyme the composition, structuring it on an orthogonal grid where they adopt rotations and inversions, making an ample choice of combinations possible.

The signs of writing remain readable but not interpretable, as the rest of a movement that leads us to read not the product but the production process by António Sena. The deviation of writing is an inimitable mark of a gesture, of the artist's body dispersed on an expressively crafted textural surface.

Scattered signs in the void next to geometric linear traces give rise to a set of spatial densities. Between the opacity, the surprise comes to the encounter of a word sea which, together with the title Deep, acts like bait signification: the nominalist power of the name activates the capacity of evocation, bringing all the references of which it is depository, a set of sensations without analogical relationships that converge in the deep and deep blue.