Mário CESARINY (1923)

The creative force behind a vast poetic oeuvre in the literary and visual arts fields, Mário Cesariny de Vasconcelos is an unavoidable name in Portuguese Surrealism whose life and work are merged into one, embodying the “human multi-coloured liberty” proclaimed by André Breton.

Born in Lisbon in 1923, the artist quickly displayed a markedly artistic sensibility. He received a musical education and attended the António Arroio Decorative Arts School (1936-43). There he met some of the artists who would later become collaborators in the surrealist adventure that swept through Portugal, bringing with it as it did, a blossoming in literature and the arts. Of particular note during this period are the irreverent manifestations at the Café Herminius themed on the fantastic and the abject, and characterised by an unbridled, nihilistic humour of a definite dadaist slant (a movement nonetheless, which these early practitioners had yet to hear of).

By 1945, the devastating events that the world had witnessed succeeded in provoking a political conscience in these young intellectuals, and they proposed a visionary reformulation of reality in opposition and contrary to the pervasive agenda of the establishment. Fleetingly, their ideas shared a common ground with those of Neo Realism. Cesariny’s articles in the Arts page of the newspaper A Tarde, date from this period, as does the collage General De Gaule – executed in a decidedly surreal idiom, this piece alludes starkly to the atmosphere of war. The year of the great Paris exhibition, Le Surréalisme en 1947 coincided with the reorganisation of a second phase in the Surrealist Movement and with Cesariny’s move to the French capital. During his stay he met André Breton and, despite his distance, managed to join the Grupo Surrealista de Lisboa (The Lisbon Group of Surrealists, GSL), established in July 1947 by Alexandre O’Neill, Fernando de Azevedo, Marcelino Vespeira, João Moniz Pereira, António Domingues, António Pedro, and José-Augusto França. However, issues with António Pedro and José-Augusto França (with whom a fiery argument was maintained for years) drove him to leave the Grupo Surrealista de Lisboa before they held their first exhibition in January 1949.

Still during that same year, Cesariny founded an “anti-group”, os Surrealistas along with Artur do Cruzeiro Seixas, Pedro Oom, António Maria Lisboa, Carlos Calvet, Mário-Henrique Leiria, Henrique Risques Pereira, Fernando José Francisco, and others, with whom he has two exhibitions, in June-July 1949 and in June 1950. In the collective manifesto A Afixação Proibida (Bill-Posting Prohibited) of 1949 and during the sessions of O Surrealismo e o seu Público em 1949 (Surrealism and its Public in 1949) he asserted a surrealist attitude which was “anti” leaderships or “anti” any organisational proposal or programme.

Although Cesariny became known through his writing, where he revealed his mastery, it was in “anti-painting” that he was able to maintain a constant link to surrealism that in turn, fed back into his poetry. Affinities with Georges Hugnet, Victor Brauner and Max Ernst are visible in his work, but the extremism of his experiments led him to pioneer abstractionism in Portuguese art.

Devoid of a specific education in this area, Cesariny pursued an automatism centred on spontaneity, disdainful of any ethical or aesthetic restraints, and unconcerned with the restrictions related to a technical expertise that he knew he neither possessed nor desired. However, his lack of technical skill was reformulated as a freedom through which he could pursue his varied incursions into the plastic arts – unhampered, and to the extremes.

He experimented with techniques of occultation, using a dark blotch of ink to cover parts of pre-existing images and highlight an alternative poetic of visual identity; he explored the composition of paintings through juxtaposing layers of paint or gouache, later often rubbing these to create arbitrary mixes of colour, and sometimes he added coffee and polish to better allow the intensity of the gesture to emerge; he also created “sismofiguras”, on trolley or bus rides, resembling seismograph readings, these were drawings where the movements of his hand were directed solely by the movements and vibrations of his carriage.

Another experiment entitled “soprofiguras” (Breathfigures) evinces fluidly irregular forms which have been created by squirting paint on a surface and then allowing it to spread out arbitrarily according to the force of breathing upon it or by moving the support.

Words were not altogether excluded from his plastic creation. In visual poems, or picto-collages, Cesariny combined images with cut-out words to compose poems where words and small images are mutually infused with new meanings, strange relationships that reach the absurd and the surprising, as exemplified in the 1947 diptych Poème.

Some of the cadavre exquis executed with Mário-Henrique Leiria or with Carlos Eurico da Costa or Francisco Aranda display an unexpected chromatic symbiosis and became of import to Cesariny’s future work. These pieces represent the plenitude of a collective involvement wherein each participant’s individuality becomes united, coexisting with the whole.
When the Surrealist Movement broke up in 1952, Cesariny continued on his surrealist path alone. He became close to other international groups, particularly the group Phases, and participated in several international exhibitions like the I Exposição Surrealista no Brasil, São Paulo, 1967 (The first surrealist exhibition in São Paulo Brazil, 1967) and the World Surrealist Exhibition in Chicago, 1976.

In the poetic and pictorial path he continued to pursue, two series from the 70s stand out: Aquamoto, a convulsion in black and white wherein writing operates pictorially; and, Linha de Água (Water Line), continuous and tranquil spaces of dreams and interior reality consisting of inverted planes of light colours, blues or greys. From his vast written work the following should be mentioned: Corpo Visível (The Visible Body, 1950), A Intervenção Surrealista (Surrealist Intervention, 1958), Nobilíssima Visão (Noble Vision, 1959), Poesia, 1944-1955 (Poetry, 1944-1955, 1961), Um Auto para Jerusalém (An Act for Jerusalem, 1964), As Mãos na Água a Cabeça no Mar (Hands in the Water and Head in the Sea, 1972).

For the artist, art (painting in particular) “was, and continues to be, a solid ground for the defence and catapult of man’s fundamental poetic values”. (Cesariny, interview in Primeiro de Janeiro, 25/05/1988).

ADELAIDE GINGA TCHEN