Manuel BOTELHO (1950)

Manuel Botelho was born in Lisbon in 1950 within a family of artists, architects and amateur musicians. He studied and trained as an architect (ESBAL, 1976), although he had always developed other interests, which have served to deepen his knowledge as a visual artist (he had lessons with painter Sá Nogueira at SNBA) and musician (Botelho attended the Hot Club jazz school from 1980-81).

He definitively abandoned his practice as an architect in 1983 and established himself in London with a student grant awarded by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation (up until 1985). Botelho developed his skills in painting and drawing at the Byam Shaw School of Art, and later– alongside Paula Rego– at the Slade School of Art (up until 1987). There he furthered his interest in the oeuvre of Phillip Guston, as well as Goya, one of his original references.

This orientation in taste and personal sensitivity, as well as the historical context in which he began his new professional practice, determined the neo-expressionist nature of his work.

Yet this aesthetic and thematic feature rendered neither an accommodated technique nor a subjectivist closure. From the point of view of form, composition and technique, a constant process of research and experience can be observed. From a thematic angle, the artist’s permanent capacity to transform episodes and individual feelings into paradigmatic registers of behaviours or feelings which thus become or assume universal values, can also be noted.

His initial work, which he already developed in series, appears as commenting on events that marked him personally (separations in particular – be it the break up of a love affair or the death of dear family-members) and general thoughts about Portugal. The country, although this was 1980s, appears as parochial, still rural, Salazarist and pious. Scenographic elements merely indicative of place together with simplified spaces and thick murky colours (between black and brown, dry green and dirty yellow) smeared on materially comprised the currents of his depictive vocabulary during this period.

His return to Portugal was to gradually quieten this anxiety, establishing (at the end of the decade) a return to a kind of order determined by a formal research into certain cubist and post-cubist approaches, naturally this focused on Braque and Picasso. Without needing to change his previous palette, lines began to regulate and circumscribe his smeared fields of colour, framing his collages and defining what was essential to the pictorial surface, playfully match-making planes where figures were inserted.

This phase prolonged itself up until around the year of 1994 and was never disregarded as a formula which his disintegrating vision maintained. Botelho then made a very profitable return to the sources of his prior inventions and inspirations. This return took place beyond the traditional expectations of Neo-Expressionism. The subjectivity of his themes served a more explicit social or political intent. The series of paintings where he reflects upon his teaching experiences in secondary schools and life in the suburbs (Anjos e Demónios [Angels and Demons] and Trancas e Arrombamentos [Locks and Housebreakings], 1995-98), directed Botelho away from the more evident side of daily experience to progressively generalised themes – which however carried within them erudite and ciphered links to the history of art and architecture, a theme that has remained present in his work – as seen at Galeria Módulo, Lisbon, in 2003.

Botelho’s treatment of form progressively and definitively separated line (which grew thinner and more “drawn”) from his restricted chromatic smears. His paintings and drawings gain expression from the superimposed solutions and associations and the way he surprisingly conjugates form and scale, which were also of extremes, without ever defining inner or outer spaces.

His quoting of forms of a classical sensibility, nonetheless takes place within a pictorial discourse which remains anti-classical. Renaissance (for instance, Boticelli) and modern (Bauhaus, Le Corbusier) sources coexist in permanent tension. A simultaneously ironic and dramatic self-representation interferes with the universality of these references. This strategy enables Botelho to maintain multiple modalities of representation under investigation, simultaneously relating various artistic idioms and diverse cultural levels through a subordination of the political to the cultural, he redefines universal models that we take as individual, researching the permanence western culture (as in the “crucifixions”, the “pietà”, the lengthy series of “visitations”) has for contemporary life.

JOÃO PINHARANDA