Artur do Cruzeiro Seixas (Amadora, 1920 — Lisbon, 2020) was a painter, set designer, illustrator and poet. The grandson of a Drawing professor, he attended the António Arroio School of Decorative Arts. Admittedly a bad student, he confessed learning especially from his friends, namely at the Café Herminius gatherings.
After a neo-realistic experience, he discovered Breton's manifestos, joining the Surrealist group exhibition in 1949. With Mário Cesariny, Mário Henrique Leiria, Carlos Calvet, António Maria Lisboa, among others, he created the dissident group “Os Surrealistas”. In 1950, he joined the Merchant Navy. After two trips around the world, he settled in Angola, where he organized his first solo exhibition (1953) and worked at the Angola Museum (Manuel Vinhas’ collection). He then starts collecting African art and writing his first poetic texts that, together with his drawings, paintings, collages and objects, make for a coherent body of work. His draughtsman’s qualities and his dark, poetic, although ironic, visual characteristics, create a strong aesthetic impact.
In 1964, he returned to Portugal, pursuing his illustration work, especially for Cesariny's book covers. He also continued to write, draw and paint, regularly showing his creations in solo (first retrospective at Galeria Bucholz, Lisbon) and group exhibitions, in Portugal, Brazil and Holland.
In the following years, he travelled throughout Europe, meeting surrealist artists. Working for Galleries 111, S. Mamede, and Casino Estoril, he promoted the works of artists António Areal, Vieira da Silva, Carlos Calvet, Paula Rego, Mário Botas, Grupo Cobra, Henry Michau, or Sarah Affonso. Based in the Algarve, in the 1980s, he worked for several galleries and continued to show his work. Declining the practice of painting in the 90s, he never abandoned drawing or writing. In 1999, he offered his personal art collection (more than 400 artworks), archive, and book collection to the Cupertino de Miranda Foundation (Vila Nova de Famalicão), to create the Portuguese Centre for Surrealism.
His precise use of the line nurtured his vertiginous and often desolate atmospheres. With a disturbing, violent, and ironic dreamlike compositions, his plastic and poetic work, masterfully synthesized in the self-portrait object "Hand", in the collection of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, is also represented in the collections of the National Museum of Contemporary Art and the Cupertino de Miranda Foundation.
EF, dezembro 2020
