[open the box] Ernesto de Sousa

Ernesto de Sousa’s photographs are details of a narrative, the pictures taken by a filmmaker, remains and fragments of memories, witnesses to moments, maps of personal relationships and exercises in aesthetic militancy.

Their sequential nature builds a panorama of Portuguese art, and shows the web of personal relationships that defined a network of paths in the late sixties, involving a rejection of painting, a vague idea of experimentalism and a fascination for the transforming possibility of an art that mixed concept and change.

The revolution, its utopia, and the fiction of absolute transformation run through these images, coming from a mysterious project that link them to the mark of his foot made with rubber stamp ink on a shoe cloth from the Hotel des Colonies, in Brussels, and an envelope addressed to the “Painter José Ernesto de Sousa” from the Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian. This was presented to the exhibition O papel como suporte de expressão plástica, which was held at the Sociedade Nacional de Belas-Artes in July 1977, and was excluded by the jury, which would only accept the photographic proofs – which led Ernesto de Sousa removing the work from the exhibition on the day of the inauguration, with a great deal of kerfuffle and video recording.

These pictures by Ernesto de Sousa are a sign of those times of quick changes: the mark of a foot on a shoe shin paper, an envelope, contact proofs as photograms for a possible film, the irony of the showing of the title “painter”: everything speaks of shifting and change, of travel and disquiet.

They are a moment in the flow of signs of change that made up his path as a critic, an essayist, and as an aesthetic operator, as he called himself.

Biography
Ernesto de Sousa (Lisbon, 1921-1988) was an artist, researcher and art critic. He devoted his artistic practice to fields such as the visual arts, photography, cinema, video and theatre. He attended the Faculdade de Ciências de Lisboa in the nineteen forties, when he began to collaborate on newspapers and magazines such as Seara Nova and Colóquio Artes. In 1949 he went to Paris, where he stayed until 1952, attending courses at the Cinémathèque Française, the Sorbonne and the École du Louvre, among others.In 1946 he founded the Círculo de Cinema, considered to be the first Portuguese cinema club. Between 1956 and 1961 he worked for the magazine Imagem, of which he was the director. He directed several films, among which Dom Roberto, that won an award at the 1963 Cannes Film Festival. In 1977 he organized the Alternativa zero exhibition at the Galeria Nacional de Arte Moderna in Belém. He was the cura- tor of the Portuguese participation at the Venice biennials of 1980, 1982 and 1984. His work was shown in a retrospective in the exhibitions Itinerários (Galeria Almada Negreiros – Secretaria de Estado da Cultura, Lisbon, 1987) and Revolution my body (Centro de Arte Moderna – Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, 1998).

Bibliography
Revolution my body (cat.), Lisboa, Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, 1998.
Sousa, Ernesto de, Ser moderno em Portugal, Lisboa, Assírio & Alvim, 1998.