Álvaro Lapa

The various series of works constituting Lapa’s oeuvre were often exhibited as series in one-person shows, so that the artist would quip that he “paints exhibitions, not pictures”. Quixote na Bastilha [Quixote at the Bastille] was the title of an exhibition of his work in Lisbon at the National Society of Fine Arts (SNBA) in 1993, and it is to this series that Francisco de Assis [Francis of Assisi] belongs. A typical instance of Lapa’s methods of associating painting and literature, this series of works is composed of eight paintings linked by a narrative, not in a diegetic sense, but combined in an apparently random, disorderly fashion. Francis of Assisi is the first picture in an unfolding that involves other historic and literary figures, as diverse as Cleopatra and Sinbad. This work digresses from the stylistic coherence that critics generally attribute to Lapa. Here, the artist has re-used one of his older paintings as a support: hidden behind the cream coloured surface sliced in two by a yellow line, is the painting Os três cartões de «art moderne» [The Three Cards of “art modern”], which was shown at the exhibition Exposição 73, also at the SNBA. The surface of this original painting peeps through on the upper right hand corner of Francis of Assisi. Lapa links this work, and each painting from this series, to a small caption that does nothing to help us understand the work in question. Rather, it operates as a cipher, a fragment of fiction, establishing an ambiguous relationship between text and image.

AS