Álvaro Lapa

In an interview published in the catalogue of the exhibition Tríptico [Triptych] (1991), Álvaro Lapa noted that the outcome of his activity as a painter was always either a “portrait” or a “landscape”. Passeio – 4 [Walk – 4] belongs to the series of “landscape” works, as he called them in the exhibition for the EDP Award, which he won in 2004. This is a painting from an eponymous series shown at the exhibition Signos [Signs] in 1985, at the EMI-Valentim de Carvalho Gallery in Lisbon. It is linked by the use of certain symbols – mountains and black figures of particular proportions and placed in different configurations – to the series Auto, made at the same time. The space is organised through the contrast of black and grey silhouetted forms against a blue ground. These emerge in relation to a very faint horizon line, creating an effect of depth and invoking structural elements of the landscape genre. We identify, close to this line, floating into the distance, a pair of black silhouettes. For the artist, “landscape” signifies a place that we traverse, a place where we find ourselves, where we imagine ourselves to be. Walk – 4 is structured as an episode in a series of works with a narrative inclination, a sequence that alludes to personal experience and is essentially.

AS