[open the box] Joaquim Bravo

Joaquim Bravo’s career began in Évora, where he was born and formed a friendship with Álvaro Lapa, António Charrua and António Palolo. This informed and educated group of artists was very active on the emerging art scene of the sixties, absorbing references that mixed literary and philosophical passion (as is the case of Lapa and Bravo) with a peculiar pictorial sharpness (that can be seen in Charrua’s and Palolo’s works).

Joaquim Bravo came up with different formulations over time, but during the eighties and until his death in 1990, drawing stands as the matrix that informs his painting, as well as the field of research that he developed more gradually. There are some aspects that are always present in his work from this period, which covers an enormous spectrum of types. In the first place, a great chromatic simplicity, with a regular use of black and white, establishing fields that stand out against the background. On the other hand, a use of the line, literally like a sewing thread that unites fields, or like an underlining that brings the chromatic fields towards a different logic, almost that of writing.

In Joaquim Bravo’s black and white fields there is a memory of a plane, of a map of a territory that spreads out, of a hill, of a subtle rising of land, often of an element that structures a landscape, a road that crosses a field of corn. Or not; everything is strictly abstract, pretending that absolute abstraction exists. Perhaps the tenuous landscape evoked is of the same nature as the frontiers that divide up Piet Mondrian’s chromatic fields, probably also evocative of the Dutch dikes, the dividing lines between properties that run through all of the Dutch landscape paintings of the XVII century.

We cannot tell. Metaphor was never a condition of his painting, nor of his drawing.

Biography
The self-taught artist Joaquim Bravo (Évora, 1935-Lisbon, 1990) studied at the Faculdade de Letras de Lisboa, gaining a solid cultural training in the field of literature and philosophy. He held his first exhibition in 1963, at the Galeria 111, in Lisbon. In 1964 he travelled to Germany, where he remained for two years. In 1966 he returned to Portu- gal, exhibiting at the Quadrante (1971) and Buchholz (1971-1972) galleries. Between 1973 and 1982 he went through a period of distancing and introspection, punctuated with occasional participations in group events. He held solo exhibitions in 1986, 1987 and 1989 at the Galeria EMI – Valentim de Carvalho. In 2000 the Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian (Lisbon) devoted a retrospective exhibition to him.

Bibliography
Bravo, 58 desenhos (cat.), Lisboa, Galeria Diferença, 1980.
Bravo, Lisboa, Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, 2000.