From the 1980s onwards the dynamism which resulted from the democratic revolution in 1974 and the subsequent opening up of the country to the outside world and its integration into Europe have all favoured a notable renewal of the Portuguese artistic panorama. This process has also benefited from the fact that it has taken place in a new, aesthetically and financially more favourable international environment. Geographic pluralism, which has altered the relationships between centres and peripheries, and the growing globalisation of information have contributed to the inversion of a national situation that used to be dependent on its very peripheral status and isolation – factors that were only partly countered by the existence of numerous Portuguese artists in other countries. No longer characterised by a national identity that was once closed to cosmopolitanism, today’s Portuguese art is marked by its assimilation of international languages and by the preponderance of the individual paths taken by its authors, who shun inclusion in groups, currents or tendencies.

Amidst the overall prominence and public recognition enjoyed by a wave of artists who appeared in the 1980’s, the painter Julião Sarmento earned particular note due to the intense international presence of his work, which the 1982 Kassel Documenta projected into the realm of the institutional vanguard and its ensuing media coverage. His earlier work identified itself with neo-expressionism, before going on in several series of “white paintings” to a more secret exploration of the contents of sexual desire centred on his portrayal of women. Pedro Cabrita Reis is another internationally known artist whose creations question the architectonic spaces of our collective memory and emotional intimacy.

Other artists who first appeared in the 1980s, successfully pursuing and re-exploring some very varied itineraries, include the sculptors José Pedro Croft and Rui Chafes and the painters Manuel Botelho, Pedro Calapez, Pedro Proença and Pedro Casqueiro, whose work has also travelled beyond our borders

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Meanwhile, the panorama of Portuguese art is unfolding in the shape of a multiple space in which existing artists of acknowledged fame settle and engage in dialogue, representing earlier generations and longer journeys largely lived or at least begun abroad.

This is the case of Paris-based Júlio Pomar, whose painting began with the social realism of the 1940s and who now pursues a highly developed and ironic relationship with mythical and literary themes. Living in London, where her work is widely hailed, Paula Rego is recreating a critical figurative portrayal of the female condition and life in Portugal in which she is deepening her work’s earlier imaginary dimension along a realist vein. The sculptor João Cutileiro is discovering new technologies for working stone and pursuing a figurative tradition marked by humour, irreverence and eroticism.

Some of the other works that have earned the awareness of the public and are shaping today’s diverse artistic world are those of the sculptor Alberto Carneiro and the painters René Bertholo and Jorge Martins, those of Lourdes Castro, whose shadow outlines have found a new home on tiles and carpets, and those of Helena Almeida, who stage-manages her own body in her photographic compositions. José de Guimarães and Graça Morais both conjugate aspects and reminiscences of Portuguese popular culture in their paintings, while Eduardo Batarda prefers to go in the other direction and make ironic use of the whole of the erudite history of painting.

In the photographic field, Gérard Castello-Lopes is a pioneer from the 1950s who has continued to renew his questioning look at the visible world, while amongst the generation which came to the fore in the 1980s, the individuality of Paulo Nozolino has achieved full recognition as he pursues the documentary tradition of a street and travel photography marked by its author’s subjective eye. Jorge Molder has won fame by centring his work on speculation around the fictional self-portrait, while José Manuel Rodrigues portrays an inventory of the current Portuguese scene in the form of a visual poetry composed of both the natural elements and the human figure. Augusto Alves da Silva, younger than the others, imposes the possibility of a sociological approach on his self-criticism of photographic objectivity; Daniel Blaufuks cultivates the intimacy of observation.

Within a panorama in which the latest creations of the 1990’s immediately associate themselves with the mutations experienced on the current international scene and the questions posed by the modern world, ngela Ferreira, Cristina Mateus and Miguel Palma are employing new technologies and sociological and critical deconstruction techniques in their work, while there are many more young artists who continue to use painting as a constantly renewable vehicle with which to experiment and express themselves: Rui Serra questions the political effectiveness of the portrait; Fátima Mendonça seeks to deepen a feminine discourse on the body and personal memories; and José Loureiro re-equates the “abstract” visual values of the pictorial art.

ALEXANDRE POMAR