Mário ELOY (1900-1951)

On March 15th, 1900, Mário Eloy de Jesus Pereira was born and with him, the genesis of the second Portuguese Modernism.
 
The son of a goldsmith and grandchild of actors, he inherited a taste for the theatrical arts, having briefly studied acting and other forms of plastic expression like painting. Eloy revealed himself to be an essentially irreverent autodidact, marking all of his works with a very personal eccentricity, fruit of a long and tempestuous journey. This search for difference was stimulated by the anguished and passionate visions that tore at his spirit.
The two years he spent studying at the Lisbon School of Fine Art (1913-15) were a disappointment. With a yearning to discover his own path among the European avant-gardes, Eloy decided to depart on a trip to Madrid at the age of 19, where he frequented the Prado Museum and thus avoided the grip of a destiny that would have tied him down to a job as a bank clerk.

When he returned in 1924, Eloy participated for the first time in the Salão da Ilustração Portuguesa (Salon of Portuguese Illustration), having been christened a “talented modern producer”. Eloy worked along the same lines as the first generation of Portuguese Modernism and experienced the concerns of a century on the brink of rupture and revolutions. As he witnessed events abroad, Eloy planned his most ambitious projects for the land of his birth, just like Almada Negreiros – they both felt that Lisbon belonged to them. Eduardo Viana was another important figure in the unfolding of his work. He invited Eloy to participate in the first Modern Art Show, which he organised in 1925.

Later on, in 1943, António Dacosta, the Portuguese Surrealist, stated that Eloy’s painting “clasped a confused, sad and mature present-day humanity like a blind knot”, a reference to the context of war that deprived people of life and unleashed uncertainty onto an already bleak future. His painting displays a social concern and is essentially attentive to human suffering.
Eloy departed for Paris at this time. After several exhibitions, he discovered that he could expend all of his enthusiasm and creativity in Berlin. Paris was the centre stage at the time, with artists like Picasso, Cézanne and even Van Gogh. Eloy adapted all that he had learnt in Paris to the context of German Art.

Berlin was open to the novelty of a more objective form and so he found his path as an Expressionist – the progressionist avant-garde of the absurd and the absolute which detaches itself from Impressionism with its retrieval of inner sensations on the canvas. His introspective portraits present his models with depictions that help them develop a better understanding of themselves, rather than life-like representations.
Eloy tried to see beyond appearance: he was interested in the expressivity of inner sensations and emotions, frequently choosing deformation or caricatural disfigurement.

Eloy had a child and got married in 1928. He began to write in German magazines and brought his creations back to Portugal, thus becoming a Painter-Poet. Two years later, Mário Eloy had the honour of being the only foreigner at the Berlin Society of Visual Artists.

He returned on his own to Portugal in 1932 to participate in the state exhibitions and in the exhibition “Artistas Independentes” (Independent Artists). He was awarded the “Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso” Prize that year.

When the Second World War began, his wife and son fled from Nazism to settle in Holland. Mário Eloy, on the other hand, an errant and uneasy artist, gave in to the fantasies of his imagination – his paintings from 1939 entered the domain of deliria.

A Fuga (The Flight) from 1939 and its studies, which date back to 1937, are some of the works deposited at the CAMJAP. This painting belongs to a period in the artist’s life where his visual activity achieved its height of independence, featuring some affinities with the visual and poetic oeuvre of Chagall: his schism with reality, his desire to escape, his evasive will; feelings that were provoked by the controversial national and international context.

The fugitive flees from a canvas enveloped in strong, intense tones of blue and green, painted in layers to create waves and a feeling of escape. The canvas’s roughness also disturbs its reading; the desperate hug, given to a sketched figure with an undefined expression, reflects the artist’s state of mind.
The rare illness that afflicted Eloy became more intense in 1945. He was placed in the Telhal nursing home: madness had taken hold of all of his most genuine capacities.

Mário Eloy died on September 5th, 1951, endowing us with an oeuvre that marries individual expression and social commitment.

RITA CÔRTE FERREIRA