René BERTHOLO (1935)

Born in 1935 in Alhandra, René Bertholo studied at ESBAL between 1951 and 1957. An experimentalist attitude created in him a strong resistence towards academic study at a very early age. Between 1953 and 1955 he co-edited the magazine Ver and from 1955 to 1957 he co-directed the “Portico” Gallery with Lourdes Castro, Escada, Costa Pinheiro and Teresa de Sousa. In 1957 he went to Munich accompanied by Lourdes Castro, Costa Pinheiro and Gonçalo Duarte. He settled in Paris in 1958, the year in which this group of artists started publishing the magazine KWY. Jan Voss, Christo, and João Vieira joined the magazine in 1960. In 1959, Bertholo represented Portugal at the São Paulo Biennial. In Paris, while apparently working within the context of the Nouvelle Figuration (a French version of Pop Art extrapolated by Pierre Restany), he developed a “writing of things”, that in its pictorial nature and individuality managed to distance him from that affiliation. In Europe, a further context may also be provided by the Cobra movement and by Belgian Surrealism. From a French perspective, he is sensitive to Dubuffet’s primitive figuration and to Arman’s assemblage; he also bears witness to the vanguard dynamic of the affichistes, Kinetic Art, the informals, Group Zero, etc. However the artist usually states that Klee and Kandinsky were his first influences. He was also impressed by De Kooning, Pollock, Tobey, Rothko, Twombly, and Fahlström, among others. In 1964 he organised and participated in the Mythologies quotidiennes exhibition, and through to the end of the 1960s he showed in Paris, Italy and Northern Europe. His career remained a highly international one until the end of the 70s, when he decided to return to Portugal and live in the Algarve.

The first drawings and monotypes of the 60s were characterised by an accumulation of recurrences and sprawling extensions. In them he blended figurative expression, processes of psychic automatism based on surrealist ideas, abstraction and a vague Pop attitude: the painting within a painting, comic strip logic, a non-centred compositional structure, motifs of daily life undergoing a poetic and dreamlike transformation, a serialisation with the slightest of variations, the use of various supports (serigraphy and lithography in an artist’s edition, photography, graffiti, and accumulations).

In 1966 he built the first Modelos Reduzidos (Reduced Models), pieces with rudimentary motors left visible in the object, whose condition they question. Their playful dimensions cut into the concept of landscape, through placing a natural element (tree, sea, clouds…) in movement, within an animated and objectified drawing. In Berlin (1972-73) he studied Electronics and its applications to art, and went on to build his “sound machine”, which was only presented after 1995 along with Deskoncertos de Mozika. This work is a giant and constantly growing accumulation of modules that record and transform the sounds of every day life.

In 1974 the paintings substituted accumulation for compartmentalisation bringing about “rooms full of things”. Bertholo refers to the pleasure of mixing everything into one imaginary space, in wich he provides a “ground” for the various fluttering elements: characters from tradition and fiction, embryonic forms that waver between the animal and the vegetable, puzzles and inventories of diverse everyday objects– an imaginary and entropic delirium, in which Bertholo avoids any uniting vision, any idea of an organised syntax.

Between 1972 and 1973 he produced some works of public art, such as the paintings on Doussoubs Street in Paris, the sculptural mosaic or ceramic constructions in some school buildings and the coloured concrete sculptures at the Barreiro Hospital.

In the paintings of the following decades colour is secondary to the graphic element, yet is nonetheless endowed with very characteristic Kitsch tonalities. By a kind of intimate and intuitive notation that (not dissimilar to the “ready mades”) seeks the reconstruction of objects from memory into subjective images, Bertholo hopes to “move and inspire dreams”, ignoring either social or political criticism. After 1994 the process of four colour printing would give colours a greater life than that which was previously obtained through layers or transparencies. Computer technology further facilitates the old process of cutting, pasting, and transforming old images into new compositions. Bertholo almost always utilises existing drawings, but they are always his and drawn from his own imagination, therefore some autobiographical references can be discovered in them. However, says Bertholo, “if there is narration, it is involuntary and done by the spectator”.

LEONOR NAZARÉ