Manuel BAPTISTA (1936)

Manuel Baptista was born in Faro in 1936. He began studying Architecture in 1957, a course he abandoned in order to dedicate himself exclusively to painting. He concluded a Complementary Course in Painting at the Lisbon School of Fine Art in 1962 and lived in Paris between 1962-63 as a Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation scholar and in Ravena as an Alta Cultura scholar. He worked as a painting assistant at ESBAL between 1964 and 1972, and since 1977 he has traveled regularly to Lippstadte and Schmallenburg in Germany to work on tapestries for the Folke factory. Currently, Manuel Baptista lives and works in Faro and in Lisbon.

Baptista began to exhibit his work in 1956 and participated in the Salão dos Artistas Independentes at the Sociedade Nacional de Belas-Artes in 1959. During the 1960s, his participation at the Third Salon of Modern Art at the SNBA, the Fifth International Hallmark Art Award, NY (1960), the Visual Arts Exhibition at the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation (1961) and the Fifth Salon of Modern Art at the SNBA, with uniformly white works made in relief and cut-outs, deserve to be singled out. His solo exhibitions at the Diário de Notícias Gallery (1963), 111 Gallery (1965) and Quadrante Gallery in 1967 are also of importance.

The artist’s work from the 1950s regularly employs themes such as washerwomen, fishmongers at market, manual workers, in settings such as dockyards and the areas of their housing. His still lifes and his highly informal drawings– executed over his maths notes– echo Matisse in their laconic, yet expressive line. A tragicomedy consisting of clowns and minstrels is rendered in nervous, expressionist lines. Influences of Miró and Klee are visible in certain water-colour and Indian ink workings. The rapid delineation in the aquarelles makes smudges of the figures that sit or run.

From 1959 on, abstraction became the dominant form in Baptista’s work: informally geometric zones on dark backgrounds are filled with tangled knots, outlines and territorialised patterns. During the 1960s, as Baptista developed this abstract language, he lent the medium itself an increased importance– through rough agglomerations of glued cloth, the modulation of reliefs according to a positive/negative order, and the geometric division of the canvas into squares and his gluing of different layers. In his drawings, Indian ink and diluted colours lend a vague measure of volume to his outlines and sketches. Baptista’s line is free, whereas the stains ensure the equilibrium between what lies open and closed. Textures with earthy hues arise, as well as organic and geometric configurations. A drawing from 1963, in the shape of a set of cards foretells a motif that would reappear in a series exhibited between 1973 and 1984– the semi-circle and the fan. In 1966, Baptista presented a series of monochromes at the Galeria Quadrante. Later, in 1968, he received the First Prize for Painting from the Guérin Visual Arts Award and in 1970, the Soquil Prize.

Manuel Baptista participated in the Biennial of São Paulo in 1973 and presented a one-man show at the Museum of Art of São Paulo. The 1970s marks the vigorous affirmation of his work in the deconstruction and re-composition of surfaces, of the cut-out and glued canvas– the in-between canvas– and the tailor’s stitch. Baptista confronts suggestions of landscape with ornament and patterned sections. Fine creases, lined and curved, appear on the surface, disrupting the contours and creating a complex weave of fold and pleat. The shape of a tree cyclically insinuates itself in his work and remains present in the work of today. In 1973, commenting upon the colouring in these works, Rui Mário Gonçalves stated that they “hesitate between alluding to old materials or being frankly and cheerfully artificial or industrial”.

During the 1980s, Manuel Baptista received two more prizes. He was awarded the Painting Prize at the First Modern Art Exhibition URUS and the Grand Prize at the VI Biennial of Vila Nova de Cerveira. Baptista also held a solo exhibition at the Kunstverein in Kassel and participated in three group shows: Kompositionen im Halbrund– Facherblatter aus vier Jahrhundert, the Third Visual Arts Exhibition of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation and the exhibition 70-80 Arte Portuguesa that traveled through Brazil.

Cutting the canvas (into oval, circular, hexagonal and fan-like shapes) works in tandem with his formal decision to fill the canvas completely, a decision which is at times party to some improvisation. The visceral latency and pure plasticity in these textured and structured striations allow us to find outlines of mountains, the folds of a body, the opening of a camera lens, geologic layers, the outline of garments, background and figure.
From 1992 to 1994, Manuel Baptista had solo shows at the Quadrado Azul Gallery, the Luís Serpa Gallery and the Museu de Amarante. Casa da Cerca organised an important selected exhibition of his drawings in 1996. At his most recent individual exhibition at the Cristina Guerra Gallery, Baptista used “Sympatex”, an industrial material made of rubber with textures arranged in successive layers. The relief created rendered the shape of trees, together with the abstract shapes that are a part of his regular vocabulary. Yellow, deep blue or black, grey and white continue to be treated according to their visual and luminous values.

LEONOR NAZARÉ