João CUTILEIRO (1937)

João Cutileiro was born in Lisbon in 1937. At an early age, he began frequenting, the studios of important artists. He learned how to draw with António Pedro. From Jorge Barradas he assimilated a penchant for a decorative style and for the assembling together of different colours and textures. Finally, with António Duarte he was initiated into the art of sculpting stone. At the age of 14 he held his first solo exhibition at a sewing machine store in Reguengos de Monsaraz.

At the age of 16 he enrolled in the Escola Superior de Belas-Artes in Lisbon. Two years later, upon realizing it would be impossible to fully develop his experimentalism and creativity within the Portuguese Academicism dominated by the omnipresent aesthetic of the “Politics of the Spirit” adamantly proclaimed by his teacher Leopoldo de Almeida, he chose to study at the Slade School of Arts in London. At this school he would later become an assistant to Reg Butler.

The artist spent the first few years working mainly in ceramics and plaster. In 1966, on a trip to a marble factory in Lagos, he discovered the potential creativity and economy afforded by using electric machinery to cut stone. As a consequence of this experience, Cutileiro began working exclusively in marble and stone, conceiving a sculpting style where objects are simultaneously characterised by the simulation of a manufactured treatment and by the ostentation of the machine’s visible calligraphy. These works are based on the ambiguity between the craft of man and the forces of nature. Cutileiro’s Torsos are excellent examples of this ambiguity, works where the values of classical and modern sculpture collide.

The 60s marked the thematic choice that would dominate his entire creative production: eroticism, particularly explored through the female figure, but just as present in his flowers and birds. This eroticism is free from taboos and morality; it is set in a figuration that may be carnal or metaphorical. Cutileiro wants sensuality to be present in both the essentially tactile nature of the work, and provocatively, in an element of “voyeurism” that the experience of his work highlights.

Cutileiro’s technique is innovative: the articulation of different elements– the textured marble and distinct colours– generates a tension within the piece’s own heart. The working method, however, is classical: to bring to the surface the stone block’s inherent forms by removing the superfluous in order to retain its material and physical identity.

The artist’s career is filled with several turning points that emerge as solutions to technical, logistic, and economic problems that confronted the artist, as was the case with the “birth” of the Bifidas (Bifids). In this manner the artist’s body of work reveals itself as a path that wasn’t meditated upon or carefully planned, but rather a tribute to his unrelenting experimentalism whose ultimate goal is to deepen the expressive capabilities of stone.

1973 witnessed his most controversial piece, D. Sebastião. Regardless of the manifold feelings this public sculpture, placed in a square in the city of Lagos, may have provoked, it marked a definitive break in national statuary practices by being the first monument to defy its own commemorative logic. Cutileiro appropriated one of the most emblematic figures of Portuguese mythology, creating an anti-monument based on the young king’s (sexual) ambiguity, thus demystifying his feats as a warrior and his heroic status.

Other works, such as Maquete para Estátua Equestre (Model for Equestrian Statue), will continue to question this stereotyped iconography. A seemingly classical sculpture, this piece substantiates the artist’s aesthetic concerns. Cutileiro questions the specificities of public statuary by creating a piece that does not fit into the dimensions usually associated with monumentality. The legs of both the horse and the horseman are tangled together and sink into the block of stone creating a scene of ridiculous and ironic immobility. This irony is further reinforced by the anonymity of the horseman.

Cutileiro heralds the great rupture that in the 1980s occurred in Portuguese sculpture. He achieves this, not only through his own work, but also through his work as a teacher at the Escola da Pedra, a stonecutting school in Lagos that was frequented by several artists, such as José Pedro Croft and Manuel Rosa, who would become the figureheads of this transformation in Portuguese sculpture.

FILIPA OLIVEIRA