António DACOSTA (1914-1990)

António Dacosta was born in Angra do Heroísmo (Azores) in 1914. He moved to Lisbon in 1935 where he studied Painting at ESBAL.

In 1940 he organised, with António Pedro and Pamela Boden (an English sculptor) in Repe House, the first surrealist showing. In the same year that the grand Exposição do Mundo Português (Portuguese World Exhibition) in Belém fronted the ostentation of the dictatorship, a movement strange to this pomposity, interested in what the mind hides and in collective archetypes, began to emerge.

Dacosta contributed totally to the introduction of Surrealism in Portugal. His painting generally presents presents a dramatic nature, melancholy and even violent (the 1940 Serenata Açoriana [Azorean Serenade] and Cena Aberta [Open Scene]). Within his surrealist imagination a work like A Festa (The Party, 1942), for which he was awarded the “Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso” Prize, emerged with different characteristics, with naive and subdued figuration, a landscape of great chromatic smoothness, with children and flowers.

In 1944 part of his work disappeared. This loss was due to a fire in his Chiado workshop. Three years later Dacosta left for Paris indefinitely. From this city he contributed to the Surrealist Group Exhibit in Lisbon with only two works.

In 1949, he abandoned painting for about thirty years. During this period Dacosta published articles as an art critic in various newspapers (Diário Popular and Estado de São Paulo) and magazines, however these were a very particular type of criticism since they came from his experience as an artist. These articles belong to an artist who stopped painting because he felt the urge to ponder his activity. This is the exercise that Dacosta transports with the eyes of a painter into the realm of writing.

He started painting again around 1975. These works were abstract, of small dimensions, with collages, and many of them represented landscapes of the Azorean islands in compositions of a mythical or symbolic nature, manifesting his Azorean origins and revealing his profound ties to those islands.

In the 80s, the widespread conviction in the return to painting fostered an atmosphere where individualistic and meditative expression dominated that proved very favourable to Dacosta’s pictorial research characterised by the use of figurative subjects in perplexing contexts (landscapes and beaches, human and animal figures, nymphs, mermaids and gods). The artist also creates the As Fontes de Sintra (The Fountains of Sintra, 1980-87) and Memórias (Memories, 1980-83) as series containing a strong symbolic charge. Initially, Dacosta develops several types of “fountains” from the same formal expression. Some are framed by edges that appear to decorate the work, some are in light and soft colours, and others are painted on wood shaped like a half-moon. Latter attempts include “fountains” with birds and the bust of Camões. The identifying symbol of these “fountains” is sprouting water.

In Memórias (Memories), a reference to the artist’s own life experience, the inspirational matrix is the pyramid on the island of Terceira, as is explained by the artist in a letter to Rui Mário Gonçalves.

In the works O Bailador (Dancer) and Não Há Sim sem Não– O Eremita (There’s No Positive without a Negative– The Hermit), Dacosta introduces an obviously mystical facet to his work. In the latter work, the dark palette invokes the values of meditation. On the left side of the painting, Dacosta introduces lines and a column to organise space, while the right side is softened by different chromatics, with better illumination on the head and shoulders of the hermit as well as on the book that he is writing. In the lower right side of the painting’s centre, a skull emerges as an icon of the hermit’s retreat, symbolizing the values of thought and of death.

In February/March of 1988, two years before his death (2/12/1990), the CAM/Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation organised a retrospective exhibit of his works.

MARIA ALMEIDA LIMA