Pedro CASQUEIRO (1959)

Pedro Casqueiro was born in Lisbon in 1959 and attended the Escola Superior de Belas-Artes de Lisboa (Lisbon School of Fine Arts) during the first half of the 1980s. He participated in a generational movement characterized by the precocious affirmation of some artists (his first one person show, for example, took place in 1982), which agitated the contemporary national art scene. He also joined an informal group (that never formally established its members or gave itself a name) with some of his fellow classmates (Ana Vidigal was the most important one) and participated in exhibitions (Talentos Emergentes [Emerging Talents], 1981 and Onze Anos Depois [Eleven Years After], 1982) that defined a poetic specificity within the context of the remaining groups of artists recognized at the time. This included the predominance of plastic values (colour, gesture, materials) as the image of an irreducible subjectivity, capable of driving away any possibility of ideological or erudite interpretation.

During these years Casqueiro’s painting was what best interpreted this attitude: form would submit itself to colour, structure would be born from the act of construction, and the theme would submit itself to the global and interior energy of the pictorial elements.

Few paintings from Portugal in the 1980s transmit such an urban vision to us as do Casqueiro’s: he does not place himself on the side of the archaic myths or even of the literary erudition typical of the first generation of this decade, nor does he create second degree images (at this time). His work is concerned with the instantaneous recording of sensations, creating pictorial images that transport physical energies, sensations, feelings and emotions to us without mediation.

His painting was based on speed and surprise, on acts of unbalance and tension. He cultivated the lack of differentiation between materials and colours, forms and senses, the image and the word (inscribed), and also between abstraction and figuration. In the periods that followed, and until today, one of the unique qualities of Casqueiro’s work is the possibility for unexpected changes in discursive presuppositions, retakes or subtle cuts between each work or group of works.

Pedro Casqueiro’s painting starts off from a situation that, according to Kuspit’s classification, is “organic” (Kandinskian) but with moments that reveal connections with the (Malevichian/Mondrianesque) “geometric” solution. In fact, the visual disentanglement of his works is obvious. The image has a structured mesh even in the older and more expressionistic paintings. The geometric construction of spaces (during the period that lasts until 1987) is as clear as in the 1997 paintings. But this structure is constantly being questioned.

During the following period (1987-1993) Casqueiro opts for an appeasement of mediums and effects, namely textures, colours and forms, which become smooth and rounded. But immediately, aware of the risk of pure decoration that the solution could drive him towards, the painter starts to practice a game of partially hiding the new surfaces. The resulting images express a certain Mannerist elegance or even stone or shell inlaid work. In the period from 1993 to 1996 this becomes structured in a consistently more regular manner until it evolves into a series now with a direct relationship to architectonic painting, and to a certain hieratic contention that he will practice after 1997.

That year his painting creates vast and luminous interiors. The images suggest a screen registering a scenographic space in perspective, and are elements of a second degree of discourse: in fact we seem to navigate a modernist museum with walls exhibiting abstract paintings; and we understand the possibility of entering into an operative and permanent interaction with the images, which seem to be close to each other, as if in a video game. The work of the artist during the period from 1998 to the present continues to be exhibited as a space of contamination. Within the dominant compositional clarification, the end of the 1990s (1998-99) opens up two new paths that, together with formal and thematic aspects he has permanently taken up again, have dominated Casqueiro’s research. This is about the return of the word inscribed on the canvas and the figurative approach. Casqueiro pursues the investigation of conventional signs of visual representation in the group of paintings where the form becomes written and spoken word. Each letter and its articulation establish the image’s compositional scaffolding, making its reading significant again (Try your Luck for example). Through these signs he explores the common places of representation in comic strips (smoke, explosions, signs of movement, signs of shock, etc) and reintroduces figuration in false and provocative narratives.

JOÃO PINHARANDA