Manuel FILIPE (1908-2002)

Manuel Filipe was born in Condeixa in 1908. He died in Lisbon in 2002.

He belonged to the generation of the Neo Realists, who sought to implement a New Humanism in the arts as well as in literature. This generation was influenced by Expressionism, Socialist Realism, the Mexican artists Orozco, Rivera and Siqueiros and the Brazilian artist, Portinari. The most consistent part of his work denotes these same influences, finding in the social theme and in the fight against totalitarian oppression the inspiration to create. The Fase Negra (Dark Phase, 1943-45) results from a need felt by the painter to denounce situations of injustice characteristic of that period in Portuguese society. The chosen themes refer to the working class and the hard lives of the impoverished. Besides the intentionally dramatic record of human misery he also employs satire, evident in his caricature of bourgeois opulence. He chooses to use exclusively black charcoal lead on white paper, favoring and determining the dramatic and expressive violence of these works, thus relating them to the political-combative chain of German Expressionism. Examples of this phase are Leitura Clandestina/Audição Clandestina (Clandestine Reading/Clandestine Listening), from 1945, and the triptych Guerra (War), also from 1945. According to Manuel Filipe this combination seeks to denounce a society that despite great technological progress, produces enormous injustices with grave consequences– second class people, alienation, spreading human clusters, he also attempts to herald the first signs of nonconformity and the awakening of informed men. The characters are portrayed with their eyes exaggeratedly open and disproportionate hands and feet, which, according to the artist expresses the physical force or brutality of those who’s hands and feet are their principal means of survival. He doesn’t attempt to execute a copy of what is apparently real but a transfiguration that might serve the transmission of his feelings and ideals, identifying and empathizing with the victims that he portrays.

He demonstrates extreme courage by exposing himself in an era of declared fascism. More than an analysis, a cry of revolt presides over the creation of his works, and for this reason they were classified by the regime as subversive, originating episodes such as the withdrawal of some of his works from the Second Exhibition of Plastic Arts of the SNBA in 1947, acts of vandalism at his first individual exhibition in Oporto where his paintings were thrown on the floor and their glass broken, the Civil Governor ordering his exhibition in Braga to be shut down. The PIDE even threatened to dismiss him from his job in Guarda, Castelo Branco, Leiria and Cascais as a teacher of drawing (the painter Jorge Martins was one of his most noteworthy pupils) should he ever exhibit again.

This repression forced him to abandon artistic activity until 1961, a date that marks the beginning of a second stage that lasted until 1970 and is seen as the artist’s intermediate stage. The themes depicted in this period continue along the same social inspiration and denunciation of an agonised society. However, the crucial point of this period is the portrayal of landscapes of cities from the Alentejo in which the houses are structured as abstracting volumes. The use of oil substitutes the use of charcoal, maintaining an extremely sober use of colour.

In the 70s, he chooses a different language in which he uses a great variety of different recuperated materials and objects that are placed on the surface of his paintings, creating compositions that in conjunction with an abstract language, comment on situations of contemporary life. Examples of this last phase are the diptych Paredes de Abril (Walls of April), from 1981, in which he represents an abstract figure that is composed of painted newspaper collages and sand, where a hand making the sign of peace stands out, and the painting Catarina, also from 1981, probably an allusion to the famous Catarina Eufémia, where he included collages with the supreme image of revolt, Che Guevara, celebrating the heroes of a victory against a regime that he so criticised.

CARLA MENDES