Eduardo BATARDA (1943)

Eduardo Batarda was born in Coimbra in 1943. He completed his primary and secondary studies in his city of birth and matriculated in Medicine, a course he attended for a year, channelling his interests into the University’s academic crises and cultural activities. He moved to Lisbon to study at ESBAL, which he attended between 1963 and 1968.

The first phase of Batarda’s work is of a narrative nature and displays a disjunction between the violent and reverberating images (rendered according to the dictates of an uninhibited humour) and their (dis)articulation with the incorporated texts. This work was characterised by contrasts of blacks, reds and whites or through harmonies of reds. Batarda held his first solo exhibition in 1968 at Galeria Quadrante. His figuration was marked by the influences of “marginal” or “low” forms, namely the broad pop-culture references to the techniques and methods of cartoon and illustration.

Between 1968 and 1971, he fulfilled his military service and dedicated himself to the making and illustration of the book O Peregrino Blindado (The Blind Penguin) [The Armoured Pilgrim (The Blind Penguin)], published in 1970. Between 1971 and 1974, he attended the London Royal College of Art as a Gulbenkian Foundation scholar. He then decided to dedicate himself to aquarelle, achieving outstanding technical command in this field.

He returned to Portugal in 1974, exhibiting his work at the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation a year later. These works prolong the type of figuration, chromatic scale and humour of his previous works, and indicates later inclinations toward themes of a scandalously sexual nature, developing together with multiple literary allusions and a commentary on artistic and political issues of the day. With regards to composition, the compartmentalisation/ disjunction is frequently superseded by more eclectic and more unifying organisations. Yet several levels of interpretation, types of images and registers of communication persist, reinforcing the ambivalence and open-endedness of the works. At the end of the 1970s, Batarda moved to Oporto, where he began to lecture at ESBAP.

The 1980s mark a volte-face in his career. Batarda adopted a more austere chromatic range, deepening and layering his web of quotations, expanding his surveyed theme to include the entire history of art, which he summons through recurring formal archetypes and his use of erudite details. The intention of his commentary is less explicit and more ciphered during this period.

The paintings exhibited between 1985 and 1987, amongst them Néctar (1984), evidence the emphasis given to chromatic austerity and an even greater expansion and obfuscation of his elements of reference and the stylistic quotations suggested in each painting. His use of colour deserves special attention. Batarda began to work with several colours, which he then obliterated with white, thereafter applying semi-transparent layers of black or other close hues, leading towards the gradual dimunition of colour which, nevertheless still continues to occasionally show. The “entry” of blacks also corresponds to a phase of the definition of line and the final shape of the canvas, placed above the initial forms which had been traced in a more gestural or spontaneous manner, although within a repetitive, exhaustive and protracted construction. From an emotional and immediate level of reading into these paintings, these works tend to suggest an effect of giddiness, tumult and abyss – at times being literal representations of vortices.

Throughout the 1990s, his paintings’ colours dispute the previous primacy the black evinced, seeming to open once again, as if from the inside out, restating the dynamic dimension of shape. His works from 1997 reinforce this tendency towards diversification, summoning elements belonging to prior moments in his oeuvre.

Ever since 2000, Batarda’s painting has entered a new phase which features the clear distinction between background and form, contrasting two uniform colours, with the predominance of blacks, greys and dull tones, but without excluding some luminous samples of soft pastel hues. The word ‘form’ is probably too simple to designate the haze outlined in a manner both complex and capricious, at times quite full, suggesting organic shapes or their caricature; at others more, long linear, bristled with edges and abrupt angles. These works define a moment of extreme maturity and depuration, worked through a certain formal restraint – or even a kind of appeasement – combined with the infinite capacity and witty multiplication of suggestions and hypotheses of interpretation that characterise the artist’s work.

ALEXANDRE MELO