[open the box] René Bertholo

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.

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.

Biography
René Bertholo (Alhandra, 1935-2005) studied at the Escola de Artes Decorativas António Arroio and the Escola de Belas-Artes de Lisboa. He left Portugal at the end of the fifties, then lived in Germany and France, Paris, where he settled in 1958. There, as a student, he received a grant from the Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, and was the founder of the magazine KWY. He exhibited for the first time in 1953, his work then being presented in several shows in Portugal and abroad, among which one should note the anthological exhibition at the Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Serralves (2000). He is represented in collections such as that of the Museum of Modern Art (New York), the Moderna Museet (Stockholm), the Centro de Arte Moderna – Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian (Lisbon) and the Fundação de Serralves (Oporto).

Bibliography
René Bertholo. Pinturas (mais ou menos) recentes (cat.), Porto, Galeria Fernando Santos, 1999.
René Bertholo (cat.), Porto, Fundação de Serralves, 2000.