One of the proponents of the “return to painting” movement, Pedro Casqueiro belongs (with Ana Vidigal) to the second wave of the so-called “1980s generation”, whose social and cultural background brought forth the intensification of individual, subjective principles, disillusionment with politics and academic erudition, and the heightening of values espoused by urban “pop rock” culture (musical and visual), which marked a real turning point in the cultural scene, both in Portugal and abroad. His earlier paintings were convulsive and unruly, made of disparate, extreme materials in shocking hues, allowing both gestural abstraction and expressionist forms, using lettering or defining incipient spaces, marking out or effacing dynamic, expansive areas of the body and for the body, of the gaze and for the gaze.

 

Casqueiro gradually cut back on the materials and colours used in his work, and moved towards extremely clean surfaces. His composition underwent the same evolution; he clarified rather than simplified the complex grid that forms the basis of his work. Finally, with the same degree of radical subjectivism, Pedro Casqueiro avoided coincidences between expressionist pictorial values and thematic aims, concentrating the force of his works on exploring the language games that consolidate the groundwork carried out by the letterings, or transforming the paintings into a rich interplay of visual references.

 

Galeria (Gallery) comes from the later stages of this evolution. The compositional structure is clear, bringing together the abstraction of the grid and the figurative revelation of an architectural construction that is at once simple and spatially rich. The colour suggests complete calm, and a palette of neutral or cool colours, full of greys and soils, creates the deep spatial interaction needed to enrich the grid. There is no texture to speak of, and the image acts as a screen or a projection onto a screen. The absence of a human figure, inscription or any other startling element accentuates the coldness, solitude and sense of abandonment evoked by the image. The fact that the title is Galeria (and few of Casqueiro’s works have titles) could be meant ironically, something which occurs fairly frequently in the artist’s work. This empty space, and its clearly modernist architecture might be made for an “exhibition” of paintings, perhaps the ones in this very series, setting up a deliberately self-referential and subjective process, where melancholy counteracts the initial euphoria of his early paintings.

 

 

João Pinharanda

May 2010