Artworks
Sem título [Untitled]
painting
Date
1988
Technique
Acrylic on canvas
Dimensions
28 x 32 cm
Self-taught artist born in Minho in 1944, Raúl Perez has been drawing and painting since his childhood, having his first exhibition in 1972 at the Galeria São Mamede, in Lisbon. In the 1960s he met Portuguese surrealist personalities, such as Mário Cesariny and Cruzeiro Seixas, and thus found the aesthetic framework for his artistic production. From 1973 onwards he joined the international group Phases, exhibiting in several cities worldwide. In the work of 1989, which like so many others remains - Untitled
so that it cannot be conditioned by a reading or translated into a language that always seems inappropriate, we observe one of his uninhabited landscapes, which, as Perfecto Cuadrado states, are "landscapes more of absences than of presences”. With his characteristic economy of colours - here restricted to a range of greys, ochres, and blues in perfect harmony -, Perez offers us the wavy profile of one of his dreamlike architectures above a night sky. The waving of the surfaces, the angle at which he presents the building moving into the foreground, the empty spaces that he cuts into it and the two "chimneys" that he imagines topping it up animate the composition. From the vertical forms resembling chimneys or towers emerge petrified clouds of smoke, represented in the same materiality as the walls and a spherical form that we could associate to a moon. Buildings and stars share the same materiality, as if they were petrified dreams or dreams surprised in a suspended time. A similar strategy is adopted in the 1988 work. With the same treatment of the surfaces of the walls of his imaginary architectures, Raúl Perez closes the perspective of the scene between two walls that lead to a gap, beyond which another extension of his dreamlike space can be imagined. Interrupting our vision in the foreground, like a guardian of the route, the author paints a kind of winged flag. Perhaps to warn us that only with this surreal gaze are we allowed to enter.
LC
so that it cannot be conditioned by a reading or translated into a language that always seems inappropriate, we observe one of his uninhabited landscapes, which, as Perfecto Cuadrado states, are "landscapes more of absences than of presences”. With his characteristic economy of colours - here restricted to a range of greys, ochres, and blues in perfect harmony -, Perez offers us the wavy profile of one of his dreamlike architectures above a night sky. The waving of the surfaces, the angle at which he presents the building moving into the foreground, the empty spaces that he cuts into it and the two "chimneys" that he imagines topping it up animate the composition. From the vertical forms resembling chimneys or towers emerge petrified clouds of smoke, represented in the same materiality as the walls and a spherical form that we could associate to a moon. Buildings and stars share the same materiality, as if they were petrified dreams or dreams surprised in a suspended time. A similar strategy is adopted in the 1988 work. With the same treatment of the surfaces of the walls of his imaginary architectures, Raúl Perez closes the perspective of the scene between two walls that lead to a gap, beyond which another extension of his dreamlike space can be imagined. Interrupting our vision in the foreground, like a guardian of the route, the author paints a kind of winged flag. Perhaps to warn us that only with this surreal gaze are we allowed to enter.
LC
