António Sena

António Sena (Lisbon, 1941—). After studying at the Instituto Superior Técnico and at the Faculty of Sciences of Lisbon, Sena opted for the Engraving courses at the Cooperative Society of Portuguese Engravers. Exhibiting solo since 1964, and in group exhibitions since 1965, the same year in which a scholarship from the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation took him to London to study at St. Martin's School of Art (1965-66), he only returned to Portugal in 1975. Between 1978 and 1992, he taught painting at Ar.Co. Since then he has devoted himself to his own artistic creation. His work, nationally and internationally awarded, is represented in the collections of the National Museum of Contemporary Art, FCG's Modern Collection, Serralves Foundation, Carmona e Costa Foundation, or the EDP Foundation, among others.

While in London, his work embraced Pop Art influences. However, at the end of the 1960s, one could recognize a personal language in his works. Specific references were gone, while he pursued a personal calligraphic research. In the following decade, his painting evokes an increasingly experimental feature, displaying letters, words (his own name), numbers, graphics and targets. Colour becomes freer, while a sense of mystery invades his compositions, as the symbols used are not recognizable, but mere clues.

In the 1980s, geometric forms try to emerge from layered backgrounds. Such density increases in the following decades, in drawing and especially in painting. The successive and thick layers of earthy, muddy colours, suggest a work close to modelling, as if they were fingerpainted.

In the 2000s, the most illegible handwriting of the previous decades was replaced by texts, crosswords, numbers, scientific symbols, and arrows. While maintaining its illegibility and inspiring doubt and restlessness, time becomes evident as a central theme in Sena’s work, symbolized by the presence of hourglasses, labels and suggestion of tombstones, in particular that which holds the epitaph of Paul Klee, a quote in German (a language the author doesn’t speak and that is little known in Portugal). Since then, and in a constant rewriting of the world, António Sena's work remains an essay on finitude and on the mystery that will never be revealed.

EF, dezembro 2020