[open the box] Mário Cesariny

“I am on a very high pedestal, clap and let me go home alone”, commented Mário Cesariny towards the end of his life, when public recognition weighed heavy on him, not without a certain discreet pleasure. His career had been very long when he died at home on the 26th of November 2006. He had written many books, and made many compilations of texts, manifestos and, above all, poetry. He was extremely active around the area of surrealism, a political and poetic weapon he discovered in 1947 in his contact in Paris with André Breton, whose life he would take as a way of being.

Mário Cesariny de Vasconcelos’ career has been duly described, inventoried and argued over. It has already been catalogued and honoured with commendations. At the depths of his course, specifically in his artistic work (if one can separate it from his poetic activity), there shines a light that is born out of a creativity that is distant from any idea of the virtuoso. He was interested in the process, the loss of control, the inventing of little working disciplines that provided results in which the random occupied a determined place. In the cadavre exquis he carried out with other artists and companions in art, in the seismo-figures drawn to the rhythm of the jerking movements of trams, in the breathed-figures spilt on paper – in all of these things there is always the same will to allow something to happen beyond the tyranny of awareness, previous to artistic reason and, therefore, perhaps more profound.

This rejection of the systematic, the plan, the map, the proficiency of the hand, the acrobatic dexterity of the gesture is what draws out the continuum of what he called surrealism.

Beyond the groups and his friendships with Alexandre O’Neill, Fernando de Azevedo, Marcelino Vespeira, António Pedro and José-Augusto França (firstly), or with Cruzeiro Seixas, Pedro Oom, António Maria Lisboa, Carlos Calvet, Mário-Henrique Leiria (secondly, and after breaking off from the first ones), Cesariny followed a solitary path.

He often gave up (playing piano, writing), as if Melville’s Bartleby was his example. “I would prefer not to”, seems to echo in many ways throughout his frail, intense and often vibrant path.

Biography
Mário Cesariny (Lisbon, 1923-2006), a fundamental representative of Portuguese surrealism, carried out his artistic activity in the fields of poetry and the visual arts, focusing his work on painting but also making collages, soprografias and cadavres-exquis. He attended the Escola Industrial António Arroio (Applied Art) (1936-1943) and studied music under Fernando Lopes-Graça. In 1947 he went to the Académie de La Grande Chaumière, in Paris, where he met André Breton, and in the same year joined the Grupo Sur- realista de Lisboa, whose members included, among others, António Pedro, José-Augusto França and Alexandre O’Neill. He later became a dissident from this group, creating another one, called “Os Surrealistas”. He participated in the first and second surrealist exhibitions in 1949 and 1950, respectively, along with the 1a exposição surrealista in Brazil (São Paulo, 1967) and the Exposição surrealista mundial in Chicago (1976). In 2005, for the first and only time, he accepted a prize, from the Associação Portuguesa de Escritores, at the same time receiving the Grã-cruz da Ordem da Liberdade.

Bibliography
Mário Cesariny, 47 anos de pintura (cat.), Torres Novas, Galeria Naupergama, 1993.
Almeida, Bernardo Pinto de, Mário Cesariny, a imagem em movimento, Lisboa, Editorial Caminho, 2005.