One of the first authors to approach surrealism in Portugal, António Pedro, a poet, a journalist and a founder of newspapers, first experimented with the visual arts in 1934. One of the first works of the Portuguese surrealist movement, this painting integrates a line of work that António Pedro had been exploring at least since 1936.

The suggestion of a body, as if in a dream, lays on a structure that resonates an Ionian column. A vibrant palette of reds, oranges and ochres, the round and speckled shapes of light (the golden spots scattered over the most igneous mass of the composition) resemble cut-out shapes, suggesting autonomous bodies of indefinite nature. The human presence is hinted by the outline of a head profile and by a hand that lays abandoned on the column. The head, with its pale, lunar face, evolves to a deep and volumetric orange of imprecise shapes. On the other side of these shapes, other complementary forms, that António Pedro had already used in previous works, invite the observer to a reverie state of mind.

The colour vibration and the undulating movement create a sharp contrast with the only upright and neutral colour element: the column. On its surface, some weary lines suggest the passing of time on the stone’s surface. The dilution of the body of the column with the painting’s background inspire a feeling of unreality, in which the sense of time becomes diffuse and the feeling of spatial fluidity refer again to the universe of dreams, in its intangible space-time relation.

EF

Guilherme Parente

Artworks

Sem título [Untitled]s.d

António Palolo

António Pedro