Pedro CALAPEZ (1953)

In a country with little tradition within the field of painting, Pedro Calapez (Lisbon, 1953) represents a rare case of perseverance and proficiency. In fact, the steps taken by Calapez over the past twenty years have been marked by his visual consistency, from both his stance with relation to the specific metier of painting and his level of conceptual intervention.

The work of Pedro Calapez was established within the specific context, of the early 1980s, a period that witnessed the emergence of Postmodernism – which, according to its theoreticians escaped the straitjacket of conceptualism, enabling a return to free expression and the inclusion of a wide field of historical references – and the return to painting and sculpture as traditional disciplines. Occurring at the margins of the decade’s unbridled rhythm, Calapez’s work built itself through a learned dialogue with past painting, a dialogue which served to develop the artist’s extensive vocabulary of techniques, of ways of seeing and rendering. One of the culminating points of this historic period in Portugal was marked by the exhibition Arquipélago at the SNBA in 1985, with works by Rosa Carvalho, Ana Léon, Pedro Cabrita Reis, Rui Sanches and Calapez himself.

At the risk of seeming too schematic, two periods can be distinguished in the artist’s oeuvre: the first, up until 1995 (Muro Contra Muro, Galeria Luís Serpa), is marked by the prominence of drawing as structure and the physical importance of architecture, which confronts the body of the painting with the body of the beholder; the second, seen in the exhibition Memória Involuntária (Involuntary Recollection, Museu do Chiado, 1996) henceforth, is characterised by the crucial role played by an extensive chromatic palette and the subtle induction of what we could possibly term ‘a musical experience of a synaesthetic order’ (an ensemble of various small paintings with differing layers, functioning as a single painting), appealing at first to the reconstitution of meaning through recollection and the complex mechanisms of perceptive emotion.

But if there is some feature that connects these two phases, it is his reflection on space. This theme has existed throughout his work; in his dialogues with other artists, especially Piranesi, whereby the concrete space of the work with is constructed with analogy to the illusory renaissance/post-renaissance space. The spatial concerns are also evidenced in the way he defines a scheme of modes of perception with the body as reference, positioning the beholder within the work, more than in front of it, and therefore appealing to the endogenous and exogenous languages of the specific field of painting (for instance, the idioms of cartoon or the nature of computer generated images).

Ultimately, the (im)possibility of defining the borders of the perceptive domain seems to define the specific nature of each of Calapez’s periods.

Pedro Calapez’s oeuvre is internationally recognised. He has had a number of important solo exhibitions abroad, for instance, Campo de Sombras (Field of Shadows, Pilar and Juan Miró Foundation, Mallorca, 1997), Studiolo (Interval, Witten, 1998) and Madre Agua (MEIAC, Badajoz, and CAAC, Seville, 2002). Calapez was awarded the EDP Prize in painting in 2001.

NUNO FARIA