Carlos CALVET (1928)

Carlos Calvet was born in Lisbon in 1928.
He dedicated himself to painting very early on, although he completed an architectural degree at the Escola Superior de Belas-Artes in Oporto, Portugal. Calvet only started exhibiting in 1947 but considers 1944 as beginning his artistic career, thus making 2004 its sixtieth anniversary. He also takes an interest in photography and cinema, in addition to painting and architecture.

Synthetic Cubism was this artist’s first reference, in 1948, and Braque is the painter that most seduced Calvet, confirmed by his still-lifes of the period.

He met with the Surrealists in the years 1948-50 though never officially joined them being only a “travelling companion”. Within this environment, together with Mário-Henrique Leiria and António Areal, he turned his attention to the cadavre exquis technique, and directed some short surrealist films. The poet Mário Cesariny participated in one of these.

The 1960s is the decade when Calvet became established in the art world. On the one hand he produced work which fitted between an organic informalism close to gestural abstraction, influenced by Mathieu’s work and Constructivist and abstract “Hard-edge” painting. On the other hand Pop figuration defined other elements of his work, along with a dreamlike and metaphysical landscape linking him to Giorgio de Chirico. According to José Augusto-França, Carlos Calvet formed a metaphysical category that Portuguese national painting had never dared approach before. His images, through very clever games of changes in traditional scenographic space, or unusual associations with ideas, provoke a restlessness and excitement in the viewer. These reactions are not simply retinal, but main appeal is to the mind. The strange architecture and odd perspective scale and inconceivable framings, together with sets of everyday objects that transcend their own normality, locate his work in the “Fantastic”. In 1986, following a conference at the ACARTE at the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation entitled O Fantástico na Arte Contemporânea (The Fantastic of Contemporary Art), he exhibits, together with other artists, works such as Decantação Solitária (Solitary Decantation, 1949).

Alegoria à Brasileira do Chiado (Allegory to the Brasileira of Chiado, 1971), and Edificiária, 1963, are examples of his absurdist game. He opens paintings within a painting, juxtaposes and counterposes objects. He demands a mobile reading from the viewer, taking into account the multiplication of perspectives that he called “Espaciomaquia”.

Calvet’s images are often ironic and humorous. Some of the effects obtained by the fantastic images provoke feelings of catastrophe, threat and anxiety in the viewer. An example of this is the work Ansiedade e Terror em Lisboa, 1980, wherein the city trembles before a floodtide of tragedy. In the distance, a bad omen, a forewarning of fatal military disaster is signaled in the sands of Africa– symbolised by the skull emerging from the sea, with the representation of the five corners of the Portuguese flag’s crest on top of it.

Another frequent and problematic issue in his work is that of sacred geometry and numerology. He conducted research into what he called the singularity of Pi. In these studies he highlights some numbers that are considered magical in Pythagorean tradition. An example is the number five, which is the first number that, in the form of a pentagon, allows for the construction of a starred polygon– the Pythagorean pentagram, a symbol of humankind open to the cosmos: the five open to the six. The enormous quantity of esoteric references makes a reading of his work into a highly hermetic activity. Geometric form is explored as archetype and origin of everything. The symbolic language of his painting is a language more open to conceptual formulations than to an immediate sensibility.

Calvet recently published Mitogeometria de Portugal e Outras Histórias (Portuguese Mythogeometry and Other Histories) that confirms on the one hand his experience as a writer, and on the other hand cements his theories regarding sacred geometry. In this book he makes an esoteric exploration of Portugal’s relationship to the question of the Fifth Empire.

In painting Talassomaquia e o Homem do Renascimento, 1983, he took up this approach once more. He makes reference to the flowering optimism as the New Discoveries opened a new world of possibilities. We find the “Vincian Man” in this reference, related to the fight with the sea, anxious to discover what is beyond the horizon, becoming an emblematic symbol of this adventure. For this, Calvet appropriates the image Figura Supérfula ex Errore, by Leonardo da Vinci, where we can see a man in exalted movement, symbolizing openness to Knowledge.

CARLA MENDES