António CARNEIRO (1872-1930)

António Carneiro was born in 1872. His artistic production should be framed within the turn-of-the century condition of self-acknowledged crisis and the difficulty of moving from one century to the next.

Art in all of its forms of expression was always taken on by him and developed as a form of self-knowledge. “The authentic, the profound reality, exists only inside of us”, wrote the artist revealing one of the absolutes of his metaphysically imbued aesthetics. This was one of the defining values of the Renascença Portuguesa movement that Carneiro belonged to, alongside saudade (a specifically Portuguese type of nostalgia), together with a certain intellectual energy. These values were shared by an entire generation in crisis, one that was aristocratic in culture and behavior, stuck in the best of the eighteenth century, and therefore marginal and incapable of overcoming the difficulties of moving from that century to the next.

Irregardless of the genre that he was dealing with, this was the “profound reality” that Carneiro sought to capture in his painting and his poetry. In this context the portrait can offer the most immediate complicity, and as such the choice of the model is decisive. It is no accident that his friends and companions from the Águia magazine (for which he was artistic director) were repeatedly his chosen models, carefully posed to render the requisite expression of common feeling. Teixeira de Pascoaes, Correia de Oliveira, Raul Brandão and Antero de Quental are but a few personalities of a vast gallery staged according to a set of pictorial and ideological values understood in terms of absence, separation or vacuity.

His approach to nature is made through an identical process and is completely determined by the choice of a precise place, perspective or atmospheric condition. The careful attention given to this choice presupposes a landscape model coinciding with his state of mind.

We know that these landscapes are not fictional, but their pictorial identification derives from this emotional encounter. Inspired by Symbolism, the typical beaches of the north of Portugal, almost on the verge of dissolution, are perhaps the result of the scientific effort to find the right colour or tone for his thoughts at dawn or at dusk. In the same way the Melgaço landscapes (CAMJAP collection) that  are more Expressionist in their density and chromatic expression reflect another type of interior turbulence.

Equally as faithful to people and places as he was to himself, António Carneiro used these mimetic devices to reveal the psychological contours of his models’ interior lives. As such the pictorial management of his own image becomes unique. There are dozens of self-portraits including drawings and oils in successive stages of realistic or metaphoric representation. In all of them António Carneiro emphasises the expressive dignity of the posture of his head, centering his compositions on the deliberateness of his eyes’ expression, vision being the privileged sense for knowing the world.

In this exercise of recognition, which is one’s own gaze on oneself, there are no signs of tranquility. Through this introspective and interceptive look the artist displays his interior unease.

Of all the works where the artist portrays himself, according to a visually homogenous and almost normative framing, two particular situations stand out. Ecce Homo (1901), inspired by French Symbolism and close in date to the triptych A Vida (1900), is a self-portrait of the painter as the figure of Christ, offended and threatening. Several years later (1923), and within the same spirit, he represents himself partly hidden by a cloak with a hood, absent from the real world, but as a messenger of vagrant truth. These are two situations where the fictional image does not come from any sort of personal theatre, but from the dramas of divine prophesy or revelation.
The self-portraits of António Carneiro are the psychological paradigm of a specific generation. Caught between tradition and modernity, between excessive introspection and an incapacity to act, this generation found itself lost in the labyrinth of an over elaborated consciousness, meditating on the ethical value of their subjective experience. With neither obvious roots nor direct consequences, António Carneiro built the closed space of the first modern experiences in Portugal. Tellingly, his work of poetry bears the title Solilóquios.

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