Dominguez ALVAREZ (1906-1942)

Born in Oporto in 1906, Álvarez began his studies in Architecture at ESBAP in 1926. He asked to be transferred to Painting in 1928, finishing in 1940 with a 100% average, an achievement that granted him a teaching post at Oporto’s Escola Industrial Infante D. Henrique. He fell victim to tuberculosis in 1942. In his short-lived life, he participated in a small number of group exhibitions.

“+ Além” is worth special mention, for Marques de Oliveira’s critical assessment of academism and naturalism established the diverging aesthetic mood. Despite being appreciated by the presencistas, his work was not to the official taste and was refused at the IV Exposição de Arte Moderna do SPN in 1939. A year later the organisation accepted only a single painting exhibiting it in poor conditions.

While alive, he held only a single individual exhibition, at the Salão Silva Porto in 1936. In 1942, under the auspices of the Instituto da Alta Cultura painters Dórdio Gomes and Camarinha arranged a new solo show. In 1951, Fernando Lanhas, Alberto de Serpa and João Menéres set up his first retrospective at the Ateneu Comercial in Oporto. This was shortly followed by the Porto academy and gallery which destined to exhibit Modern Art, the space named after Domíguez Álvarez in 1958. The 1963 exhibition at Cooperativa Gravura was the only other show before his work was finally given appropriate recognisation in 1987 with a retrospective by Serralves. Cooperativa Árvore organised a new view of his work in 2002 at the Galeria de Vilar.
He didn’t allow his feeble health to stand in the way of his prodigal and plural determination– he threw himself into study, painting and art theory (encyclopaedic and often incoherent texts that found their way into the Jornal de Notícias between the years 1934-40).

Born the son of a Galician couple, he obtained his Portuguese nationality in 1936 as a means of escaping the Spanish Civil War, althougt his references remained Galician and Castilian throughout his life. He helped to draw up the manifesto of the “+ Além” group, clearly adapting the Galician parallel (“Máis Alá”, 1925) and rarely strayed from his roots (he never visited Lisbon or fanciful Paris, which most of our Modernists claimed as the city of their inheritance and visual inspiration). He never sought the enlightenment of other sources besides the inspiration of El Greco, which he avidly pursued on his occasional visits to Spain. His interpretation of the soaring castles, the landscapes with sleepy and dream-like atmospheres, mingled with a picaresque universe. His Don Quixote, the architectonic and self-evocative face of the painter’s solitude, faithfully reflects an interior world of silence and shadows. Besides El Greco, Álvarez sought the distortion of landscape or figure together with the disquieting and abandoned atmosphere common to all of his other Galician masters (Castelao, Solana or Maside).

Álvarez’s painting, manages a synthesis of his own personal torment with these grim and lugubrious universes. It was served by a highly expressive and sincere brushwork, which he dedicated to simple, humble, everyday themes, transformed and measured according to the burden of pain and total absence of hope. In the linear architecture of his oeuvre, any change made to the compositional geometry that maintains the equilibrium of his world becomes an agent of disquiet. His oeuvre can be divided into three phases. The first, his “red” period, began in 1927. It reveals a palette of gay colours in dialogue with the blacks, greys and whites which were modelled in order to create urban landscapes, where ruby roofs crowned clumsy, yet charming scenes. A short incursion into abstraction in 1930 granted him the use of an open, almost festive palette, encountered most particularly in his watercolours, where he also experimented with cubist techniques. However, his oeuvre underwent an important change: inspired by the Spaniards, he began his period of fantastic canvases, set in dramatic and intense landscapes– a definition which holds equally well for his urban and country scenes, as well as his portraits. Madmen, cemeteries, churches and hills establish the contexts of the characters that populate his disquieting and mysterious universe. His palette had become densely opaque, embracing a light of aged gold and black, and foreboding death. Tense, shredded and elongated lines structure his compositions rendering them oblique jolts. D. Quixote is a clear example of this, installing doubt and disturbance. Even in apparently cheerful passages, his palette remained crowded with shadows. His hues strain for happiness in a fractious dialogue with the composition; an unstable space rendered through a volatile and trembling line that speaks of the fragility of reason and the agonic nature of being.

EMÍLIA FERREIRA