Nadir AFONSO (1920)

Nadir Afonso was born in 1920 in Codeçais, Chaves. He completed his studies in Architecture at the Porto School of Fine Art and subsequently studied Painting at the École des Beaux Arts of Paris. His intentions to be a painter, as well as his dedicated search for the essence and the absolute, soon outran his interest in Architecture.

Afonso’s encounter with Le Corbusier (1948-51) and Oscar Niemeyer (1952-54) did not suffice to change his convictions about architecture not being an art: “it is a science, the elaboration of team” and “a labyrinth of contingencies”, where art cannot find her affirmation.

Nadir was a part of the “Independentes” (with Resende, Lanhas, Pomar) in Oporto, and participated in all of their exhibitions up until 1946. In 1943, he began to write his first work of research, at a time when the phenomena of optics and geometry already interested him. However, a number of his paintings were characterised by expressionist features, for instance A Ribeira or Vila Nova de Gaia, whereas some works, namely those inspired by Évora, like the celebrated Composition irisée (1946), exhibited a surrealist leaning.

His work in the 40s oscillated between a registering of the human figure (usually female, and composed of undulating lines) and progressive geometric abstraction (suggesting landscapes with bridges, squares and monuments). This geometric tendency arose most tellingly during the period he painted in Fernand Léger’s studio (1948-51), and in the studios of Dewasne and Edgar Pillet. During the 50s, he accentuated this tendency by using patterns– during his “baroque” phase of composition– in a series from the “Egyptian Period” that completed his geometric stylisation (1950-55), and also in his creation of the famous series of kinetic works which he called Espacillimité (1956-63), exhibited as an inaugural piece at the Salon de Réalités Nouvelles in 1958. Afonso animated these compositions with a processing and technical-cinematographic technique. During this period, he joined the group of the Denise René Gallery, where he would exhibit his work besides artists like Vasarely, Herbin and Bloc.

From 1960 to 1969, Afonso lived with his family in Portugal and dedicated himself to studies that would culminate in the book Les Mécanismes de la création artistique (1970). During the mid 1960s, Afonso definitively gave up architecture. Works like Projections (Projections) or Galáxias (Galaxies) are significant pieces within the context of his research. In 1968, he created a series of Cidades (Cities) that would be worked on up until 1980. This process of creation (a series of successive changes to a painting) was frequently adopted by Nadir Afonso.

During the 1970s and 1980s, Afonso continued to develop abundant amounts of city–studies: these were executed in imbricated lines, in waves that animated the building’s geometry, in terms of spirals and meshes; vanishing points, together with some depth of field, were also in evidence. At the end of the 80s, works containing the human figure became common. Consolidating the compositional relationship between gesture and geometry, the figure would often be defined in terms analogous to those that made up the background.

La Sensibilité plastique (1958), Les Mécanismes de la création artistique (1970), Aesthetic Synthesis (1974), Le Sens de l’art (1983) are the result of the aesthetic reflection that marked his work. Afonso determined the style of the work of art through what he took to be its own laws: the universal rules of mathematics, geometry and space. These would be revealed in terms of harmony, making the works eternal, immutable, and independent of social conditions. According to the artist, these laws– in their originality, evocation, and perfection (when functioning either according to personal or regional needs, in the case of architecture)– were distinct and unlike those of other (non-artistic) objects. In nature, spaces are interconnected according to rules of integration and disintegration, with repercussions occurring in the most spontaneous and gestural forms. Hence, the visual arts were to be the expression of the most concrete form of essence: the square, the circle, the hexagon, etc. Rules existed in the visual to regulate the quantitative proportion of shape and the intensity of colour. But it is only by working with shapes that one can intuitively understand their internal mechanisms.

Afonso considered the gap between the faculties of reasoning and perception to be huge. Yet he found that the unconscious and innate capacity to understand natural laws lay in the faculty of perception. He argued the need to fight the illusion of rational and scientific knowledge, even the knowledge of geometry, as well as the illusion of the immanence of objects and the mystical and psychological tendencies of interpretation. The primacy of the relationship between objects themselves and the subject is fundamental to an understanding of his critique of materialism and idealism. Afonso proposed an individual alternative based on the “moral” exactness of a mathematical logic. He stated, “Aesthetics cannot be constituted by any other means except by those of the phenomenology of perceptive geometry”.

LEONOR NAZARÉ