At a glance, this painting looks like the plumage of an exotic animal, as the multicoloured birds and horses that Amadeo had drawn after Japanese prints some years before. However, it corresponds to a moment in his production, between 1915 and 1916, when he set out to recreate, through painting, certain motifs taken from the popular houses that he observed in the villages of Trás-os-Montes, in the extreme north of Portugal, coming up with an original grammar of simple and flat geometrical forms which, contrarily to Malevich's suprematism, are never detached from their referents. These circles and rectangles thus form numerous areas of uniform and very cheerful colour, although his pallet remained little diversified – in the letters he wrote to his friends, Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso actually complained often about the lack of materials to paint: “Je travaille furieusement. Il me manque beaucoup de matériaux, mais tant pis.”* Nothing conveys Amadeo's creative energy better than this musical rhythm of colours in movement, having knitted a pictorial web of very demarcated hues that create a powerful sense of contrast, as in a “poetry of colours” that was so glorified by Almada Negreiros.

* “I am working furiously. I lack plenty of materials, but so much the worse."

AR

March 2011