[open the box] João Vieira

It is vain, this love Italian style. Seen in the mirror, being reflected and thus inverted, then double inverted. There is a voyeuristic side to this narcissistic fascination, just as there is an erotic side to what is suggested in these inversions, in the subtle metaphors that our imagination might build.

In 1971, on the cover of the first issue of the magazine Colóquio Artes, which the Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian published for a hundred and eleven issues, there was a painting by João Vieira, dated close to this Amor à italiana. This was Uma rosa é, from 1968, a painting that referred to Gertrude Stein and her poem “A rose is a rose is a rose is”. A fascination for words – and for this circular poem – seems to flow through all of Vieira’s work. He himself said that his greatest influence was Cesário Verde and that the idea for the paintings of words, letters and numbers that he started in the sixties had been born out of a passion for Cesário Verde, the most pictorial of the Portuguese poets: “I paint paintings by letters, by signs”, a line taken literally, and which is at the origin of a work constructed around words.

Biography
João Vieira was born in 1934 in Vidago, Trás-os-Montes, in the north of Portugal. In 1951 he entered the Escola de Belas-Artes de Lisboa. He lived in Paris and London, settling in Portugal after the 1974 revolution. He was a co-founder of the KWY group, along with Lourdes Castro, René Bertholo, José Escada, Gonçalo Duarte, Costa Pinheiro, Jan Voss and Christo. He exhibited for the first time in 1956, since then showing his works in Portugal and abroad. Of particular note are the anthological exhibition promoted by the Centro de Arte Moderna – Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian (1985) and the retrospective of portraits at the Museu Nacional de Arte Contemporânea (MNAC) – Museu do Chiado (1996), both in Lisbon, as well as the 2002 exhibition at the Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Serralves (Oporto). He died in Lisbon in 2009.

Bibliography
KWY, Paris 1958-1968 (cat.), Lisboa, Centro Cultural de Belém/Assírio & Alvim, 2001.
Corpos de letras (cat.), Porto, Fundação de Serralves, 2002.