[open the box] Pedro Casqueiro

Sometimes hidden, somewhere we know not where, there is a painter who has travelled the multiple paths of painting as if he expected some revelation about himself from it, about the nature of images, about the processes and methods that allow an image to be pictorial. In Pedro Casqueiro’s painting there is a feeling of the possibility of painting that seems to come from an effective belief in painting’s viability to create visual worlds, tested by Casqueiro in the countless variants that he has practiced, ranging from the most geometricising abstraction and including collages or through more clearly figurative moments. Almost everything can be crossed in his painting: maps, spaces, houses, mirrors, colour charts, plants and appropriated images. What is certain is that such a profusion of instruments, images, aesthetic tools and convocations does not build metaphors of the world, or allegories of the social; nor even allegories of painting as a genre.

There is no moral in his work, nor any precept about what art or painting should or should not be, just a continued practice that is indifferent to the most emphatic discourses on the death of painting that ran through the 20th century. He thus doesn’t need to make a painting starting from photographic or videographic images; he doesn’t need to paint what we recognise – although we may recognise many images in his canvases. It is a musical painting, with the whole classic connotation that exists in this aesthetic matrix; it starts with primacies of composition, counterpoints, escapes and rebalancings. One thus understands that his painting is developed in each painting as the resolving of a specific problem, then the next one, in series that move around specific issues, to then go on to others, in each leaving ballast for the next, even when there are significant leaps in the typologies.

All of these formulations contain an idea of enchantment and permanent transfiguration of painting in their processes – which are very wide nowadays. However, as a typified form, with images inside it that stand out on the surface on which they are hanging, the format of the painting, that great Renaissance inheritance, finds an enormous field of freedom in its apparent limitation.

Biography
Pedro Casqueiro was born in Lisbon in 1959. He attended the Escola Superior de Belas-Artes de Lisboa (ESBAL) in the early eighties. He received the Drawing Revelation Prize at the 2nd Vila Nova de Cerveira Art Biennial in 1980. He held his first solo exhibition in 1981 at the Galeria Tempo, in Lisbon. Since then he has participated in many group exhibitions, such as Talentos emergentes, Galeria Leo (Lisbon, 1981), Onze anos depois, ESBAL (1982), and Uruboros, Módulo (Lisbon, 1984). In 1997, the Centro de Arte Moderna – Fun- dação Calouste Gulbenkian (CAM-FCG) devoted an extensive retrospective to his work. He is represented in several public and private collections, notably: CAM-FCG, the Fundação Luso-Americana para o Desenvolvimento, the Ministry of Culture and the Fundação PLMJ, all in Lisbon, as well as the Fundação de Serralves (Oporto).

Bibliography
Pedro Casqueiro (cat.), Lisboa, Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, 1997.
Melo, Alexandre, e Pinharanda, João, Pedro Casqueiro, Lisboa, Assírio & Alvim, 2002.