Fernando CALHAU (1948-2002)

Fernando Calhau was born in Lisbon in 1948. He finished his Bachelor’s degree in painting at the Escola Superior de Belas-Artes, Lisboa (ESBAL) in 1973, and left for London that same year with a Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation grant. He completed his studies in printmaking at the Slade School of Fine Art with artists such as Bartolomeu Cid dos Santos. The practice of printmaking was decisive for the path that he had already started upon at the Cooperativa de Gravura, where he had had his first one-person show, presenting Gravuras Brancas (White Prints), 1968. This exhibition gathered together a series of colourless, geometric reliefs printed on white paper. The exhibition pioneered his use of monochrome and the geometric reduction typical of his future work. Through printmaking, and more specifically through the reproduction integral to this process, Calhau also developed another of the principles that would guide his later work: the series. These three principles were the subsequent determinants of his visual language. This is a conceptualised language, in the sense that each series is consistently guided by repeating a pre-conceived equation that always takes on new, but almost imperceptible, qualities of formal resolution. The subtlety of this variation is the result of a decision to radically restrain the means of expression. This restraint is present in his first pieces, but later it is systematically explored from the perspective of minimalism.

In his early paintings, Calhau developed a preference for square shapes, and he also reduced colour, favoring black and white gradations instead. He achieved an absolute blackness in his work for the first time in a series of drawings from 1970. However, there was a moment when his use of monochrome lost this achromatic tendency and became compatible with an introduction of colour: in 1972 he started a series of green paintings where he explored variations in tone and luminosity. In these canvases he continued to follow the proposition of “using the fewest means of expression in whatever kind of work, reducing noise to a minimum, transforming things into the essential” (Work in Progress, 2001). This would lead him to a strong anti-formalism, the form with photography, film, and video.

While still in London (1973-74) he started to photograph natural surfaces (grass, rock, sand, sea) in order to produce photogravures. These images would become autonomous and also move into the medium of film (Mar I, II e III, 1976), as the painter discovered fundamental questions in the topography of these images– specifically in the relationship between time and space, a relationship that would henceforth guide the direction of his work. During this period he was faithful to the series format and monochrome of his previous, and now abandoned, pictorial practice. According to Calhau, “I took photographs for the concept, and it wasn’t an isolated image but a series of images related by colour or a caption, or some kind of physical object. It was not to be understood as a photograph that you could frame or that could be valued as a photograph in its own right” (idem: 129).

At the end of the 1970s the Night Works series ended his period of departure from painting. In these canvases the monochrome is given night tones, achieving a symbolic connotation explicitly connected to the universe of romanticism, which reemerges in the atmospheric qualities of his most recent paintings (Galeria Cristina Guerra, 2001). At the same time, Night Works introduces new procedures to Fernando Calhau’s work. His use of neon (more precisely argon) to write words is without doubt one of the most apparent and important innovations, since the blue light expands the symbolic connotation of the concepts expressed.

Night Works also paved the way for him to invest in the production of a series of shaped canvases in the eighties, and for iron and canvas to emerge as the preferred painting support. However the validity of the founding premises of his painting remains untouched. More precisely, in Fernando Calhau’s work the use of various mediums is guided by a demand for conceptual coherence. This is amply demonstrated in the group of works shown in the exhibition at the CAMJAP in 2001, just a few months before his death the following year.

JOANA CUNHA LEAL