Joaquim Bravo was born in Évora in 1935 and died in Lisbon in 1990. He attended the Highschool Garcia de Resende, where he was a student of the writer Vigílio Ferreira and where he met Álvaro Lapa. Belonging to the same generation, they leave together to the capital and start a course in Germanic Philology at the Faculty of Letters of Lisbon, 1957. During this period he lived with José Carlos Gonzalez, João Vieira and Herberto Hélder at the at the time famous Café Gelo. Without completing the course, Bravo is called to do his compulsory military service.
Established between Lisbon and Évora, he began painting regularly from 1962 onwards, following a gesture line that approaches American Abstract Expressionism. To the express taste for the painting of Jackson Pollock or Robert Motherwell, Bravo joins the work of Paul Klee and the surrealists. His self-taught training, which brings him closer to António Areal and Álvaro Lapa, is completed by a strong English, American, and Germanic literary culture. He also shared with Lapa and his younger countrymen Palolo and José Carvalho, the influence of Évora's artist António Charrua. Between 1964-66 he resides in Germany, visits the 3rd Kassel Documenta, gets interested in the visual writing of Henri Michaux and the geometric abstraction of Ellsworth Kell and Frank Stella.
Dissatisfied with Action Painting, Bravo explores collage, approaching neodadaist techniques - THE HUNTING OF THE SNARK, 1963, the sculpture Bota Romana, 1969 -, and continues to experiment between painting and drawing.Starting from a reduced lexicon - line, plane and colour - Bravo works signs such as the grid and the square, projecting shapes in diagrams. In these synthesis exercises, which multiply in variations, the artist reveals the tension between gesture and geometry.
Joaquim Bravo holds his first solo exhibition in 1964, in the future Galeria 111, and participates in historical collectives such as the show Novas Iconologias, organized by the critic Rui Mário Gonçalves at Buchholz Bookstore, 1967, or Abstracção Hoje SNBA, 1975. The artist achieved greater critical visibility in the 1980s, a period in which he received several awards. His work was the subject of a posthumous retrospective at the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation Modern Art Centre in 2000.
RS, setembro 2020
