[open the box] Álvaro Lapa

The notebooks are icons, and like icons they represent nothing except a participation in the work of Michaux, Sade, Fernando Pessoa, Mallarmé, Antonin Artaud and Malcolm Lowry. The choice of those being paid homage comes from the passion that Lapa felt for these writers he came to know at different moments in his life, presented to him by Vergílio Ferreira, José-Augusto França or discovered by himself. As they do not represent anything they are fields open to our imagination – why does the Sade notebook have a shape that reminds one of a painting by Barnett Newman? Why does the Michaux notebook look like an outdoor panel? What does the txt “Little legs / à la Chinese / ludettes” mean in the Artaud notebook?

As he himself stated, there is a snobbish character in this idea of the homage, in the etymological sense of the term: sine nobilitas. Contained in this irony towards himself and on the nature of artistic practice itself is his particular form of seeing painting: for Álvaro Lapa the practice of painting was always a fleeting process, for which virtuosity formed the major barrier. So his paintings are achieved through the use of thought processes coming from literature, philosophy and personal experience, and which therefore are contorted inside the images. Álvaro Lapa’s painting is one in which the rules are those that he himself defined within a process that is asystemic and which always emerges from a fiction of self-depiction: of the place and of himself, as landscapes or as portraits.

And for this reason these “notebooks” are fictional portraits that tell the ironic story of his painting as a game of failures and of its recognition.

Biography
Álvaro Lapa was born in Évora, in 1939. He enrolled in the Faculdade de Direito de Lisboa in 1956, and in 1960 he began to attend the Philosophy course, which he completes in Oporto, in 1975. On his trip to Paris in 1961 he contacted young artists close to the Grupo Surrealista. In 1970 he travelled around Europe and contacted “alternative” public experiences in Amsterdam. He moves to Oporto in 1973, where he teaches Aesthetics at the Escola Superior de Belas-Artes. His work has been exhibited in several galleries and museums, and he is represented in important institutional and private collections. Of particular note among his activity as a writer is the book, Raso como o chão, published by Editorial Estampa in 1977.

Bibliography
Álvaro Lapa (cat.), Lisboa, Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, 1999.
Álvaro Lapa (cat.), Lisboa, Fundação EDP, 2007.