António AREAL (1928-1978)

António Areal was born in Oporto in 1928. He died in Lisbon in 1978. A cardiac disease hindered his studies, which he undertook within the confines of his home. He was orientated towards the areas of literature, philosophy, and thanks to his family environment (his father was an architect), having developed a taste for, and exercises, as a self taught artist.

His early works (1955-62), which he signed as Santiago Areal, were technically astute derivatives of the surrealist formula. However the derivative aspects and the illustrative abeyance to literature were eventually overcome through an innate imaginative vigour.

He received the award in drawing at the II Exposição de Artes Plásticas at the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation in 1961 with works wherein the oneiric and surrealist formula join a strategy of cultural and even political commentary (Homenagem a Fernão Mendes Pinto, n.d. or Sem Título – Praça do Comércio, 1955). However an unexpected psychological split with the implications of his discourse meant that Areal soon discarded this new found success. Indeed, Areal’s life, which ended tragically after an unexplained brawl, was a succession of battles and contradictions on a personal, political (he was accused of collaborating with the SNI [Secretariado Nacional de Informação]) and professional level. Appropriately, his critical legacy – a rarity within the context of national artists’ contribution – was united in a volume entitled Textos de Crítica e Combate na Vanguarda das Artes Plásticas (Texts of Criticism and Combat within the Vanguard of the Visual Arts), a book of exceptional interest.

Areal exacerbated the logic of surrealist automatism, breaching the consensus surrounding his initial work, and began a phase that should be understood within the context of lyrical abstraction and action painting of 1950s Europe and America.
This period (1961-63), marked by an interim stay in Brazil, was intense, yet brief. Areal produced numerous polycentric, Pollock-type paintings – however, the paint was usually applied with a spatula, rather than by the dripping technique. He soon abandoned these efforts.

The shock of new-figuration, developed within the European critical context of “Nouveau Réalisme”, obliged him to reconsider the possibilities of figuration which he had until then denied. Areal adopted the neo-dada approach, maintaining permanent connection with the surreal derivations and/or intromission of the imaginary in his works. An example of this connection can be found in the prevalence accorded the theme of the “box”, as maintained in his construction of three-dimensional objects and his pictorial representations: he used painted cubes and/or boxes in 1964, adding heteroclite elements to them with collage and assemblage and moreover built an ensemble of boxes which were exactly the same, but were either presented empty or filled with scarce and synthetic forms. These displayed complex titles with philosophic and aesthetic references (Em Cima, um Arquétipo Divino com Atributos Iconograficamente Formulados [Above, a Divine Archetype with Attributes Formulated with Iconography], 1969).

In fact, Areal’s oeuvre consolidates itself as a field of reflection on European, renaissance and modern aesthetics (from Neo-Classicism to Cubism, as well as “pop culture” themes, such as media images and the language of cartoons) painting, as well as reflecting on his own work.

Between 1964 and 1970, Areal began what he termed “abstract figuration”, helping himself to the descriptive sense of figuration, and associating this figuration (boxes, targets, silhouettes) with an abstract counter. These works accentuate the coldness of the image with their even backgrounds, fields of smooth colour, the rigorousness of the drawing and his choice of enamel paint. The boxes and cubes which he had painted previously became illusionistically represented objects within the work from this period. His drawings also preserve an expressionist tension, conjoining the organic and mechanical in monstrous bodies.

Areal’s work presents both visual and literary impetuses. This clue is developed not only in his own writings, but also in the epistolary relations he established with Agustina Bessa-Luís (illustrating her chronicles for a book published by the Diário Popular in 1968) or Ana Hatherly, his work evolving, in this last instance, into an experimentalism with automatic drawing, cabbalist investigations (united in author’s editions), and selections of artistic referents for his own works (for instance, the series of paintings concerning Fuseli, 1973).

At the end of this intense period (1967), two series stand out: A História Dramática de um Ovo (The Dramatic Story of an Egg, 27 panels) and O Fantasma de Avignon (The Ghost of Avignon, 6 panels), both holdings of the CAMJAP collection. In the first, Areal deliberately uses cartoon to stage a dialogue between two fried eggs that move amongst a scenario of empty boxes and blank speech bubbles. A naturally comic effect exists in this work that is emphasised by the set. The original ensemble, however, which included a small complementary painting (Retrato, [Portrait], 1966) of a man bleeding, contradicted this effect. Exhibited at the SNI, this series, while characterised by self-irony, highlights the need to question the system from the inside. In the second series, one of Picasso’s “Demoiselles” is treated in the same kinetic and graphic manner. The painting, an obvious quotation of the one that founded modernity, is dealt with according to a wide field of intentions, pointing towards a commentary of the art system itself, which Areal developed in depth during the 1970s.

Between 1970 and 1973, his last period of inspiration, Areal’s painting became more aggressive, looser, the drawing and colours more expressive, his compositions more complex, often illustrating a certain serenity in his chosen themes: the happenstance nature of sentimental relationships or friendship. This was also a period of brilliant drawing (something he maintained to the end of his life), which he glossed as themes of painting and death.

In painting, besides Variações sobre um Tema de Fuseli (Variations on a Theme by Fuseli, 1973), where, subjected to the nightmare of the romantic virgin, Areal rehearsed a self-cartoon in “incubus” or a jesting variation of portraits by Josefa d’Óbidos, another ensemble of knights (evidently being the Knights of the Apocalypse, 1971) and a series of female pianists (1971-72), also deserve to be noted.

Finally his facility for quotation and reflection can be experienced in the series of 14 paintings, entitled O Coleccionador de Belas-Artes (The Fine Arts Collector, 1970). The complexity of each painting arises enriched by an implicit text where the history of art, political and cultural commentary, aesthetic considerations and personal episodes meet.

JOÃO PINHARANDA