Artworks
Sem título [Untitled]
painting
Date
1978
Technique
Felt-tip pen, graphite and fabric on canvas
Dimensions
110,7 x 79,6 cm
Manuel Baptista's initial references gravitated around Miró, Klee and Matisse, and manifested in a figurative production concerned with themes related to work and still lives. In the 60's, however, abstraction became dominant, starting a valorisation research of the medium through a deconstruction and recomposition of the surfaces. Influenced by Arte Povera and the - Nouveau Réalisme
, at a time when several other artists worked the medium in different ways, Manuel Baptista retrospectively recognized the important references for him in the work of Fontana, Tapiés and Castellani - questioning the matter, haptics and conceptualism of the painting medium.
In this work of 1978, the painter started, right away, questioning the medium when he chose an oval shaped canvas (recuperating a long tradition in art history but also the most recent - shaped canvas
trend). On that surface, he disposed elliptically abstract shapes of cut canvas coloured with felt tip pen and pencil. The contention of the chromatic range broadens the tactile character of the work. Taking geometry as a primordial architecture of the painting, Manuel Baptista warned that for the drawing to appear, the light that created that shadow was necessary. In the dialogue between the freedom of drawing and the contention of painting, the artist assumes that his “cutting poetry” needs light to reveal its structure and its sense. The dashed lines indicate clothing models, with which he worked, in a painting that merges the conceptual dimension of the questioning of painting with the bodily and material dimension of its manufacture.
LC
, at a time when several other artists worked the medium in different ways, Manuel Baptista retrospectively recognized the important references for him in the work of Fontana, Tapiés and Castellani - questioning the matter, haptics and conceptualism of the painting medium.
In this work of 1978, the painter started, right away, questioning the medium when he chose an oval shaped canvas (recuperating a long tradition in art history but also the most recent - shaped canvas
trend). On that surface, he disposed elliptically abstract shapes of cut canvas coloured with felt tip pen and pencil. The contention of the chromatic range broadens the tactile character of the work. Taking geometry as a primordial architecture of the painting, Manuel Baptista warned that for the drawing to appear, the light that created that shadow was necessary. In the dialogue between the freedom of drawing and the contention of painting, the artist assumes that his “cutting poetry” needs light to reveal its structure and its sense. The dashed lines indicate clothing models, with which he worked, in a painting that merges the conceptual dimension of the questioning of painting with the bodily and material dimension of its manufacture.
LC