Lisboa-Algeciras belongs to a vast group of paintings “traces of the memory of journeys” that Joaquim Rodrigo carried out from 1969 onwards, becoming the obsessive pretext of his painting for the following two decades. In these works, Rodrigo found the palette with which he would continue his investigation leading to “painting correctly”, a pictural theory defending the existence of a “correct painting”, composed from a determined order in the application of four colours. In the «macrobiotics of colour»* that he extols, he accepts only colours that exist in the earth – white, yellow, red and black –, to which he sometimes, when necessary, adds grey. The shapes are reduced to pictograms, a figurative expression evident in his painting since the 1960s. At that same time, he felt the need to «tell stories»** which appear as commentaries on contemporary events, in a critical selection of important occurrences in the national and international arena. Amongst the various episodes, and dealing with what was a “political decade” for the painter, the events that assume relevancy refer to the colonial war, with emphasis on the hijack of the ship Santa Maria, in a painting dated 1961.

 

The diagrammatic composition of Lisboa-Algeciras, completed in 1969, reveals a painting that is already very distant from Rodrigo’s political concerns of the beginning of the decade. The formal change that it presents, in relation to the highly coloured and dynamic compositions of the first half of the decade, demonstrates his greater concentration on the issue of painting. The pictograms and words, outlined and filled in alternately in black, white and brown, are dispersed over an ochre background, pointing to the presence of streets, bridges, rivers, settlements, roads, in a deliberately simplified figuration. In creating this pictographic lexicon, Joaquim Rodrigo uses his left hand in an effort to unlearn the process of drawing. He is likewise interested in children’s drawing, prehistoric painting, the murals of Lunda, and in aborigine painting with its groups of signs symbolising natural elements, villages and roads, in an extraordinary imagery of a territorial arrangement. The moment of drawing seems to be that which will maintain the greatest spontaneity in the artist’s posterior work, despite the recurring use of pictograms among the various paintings.

 

 

Ana Vasconcelos

Maio de 2010

 

 

* Joaquim Rodrigo. Catálogo Raisonné, Lisboa, Museu do Chiado, 1999, p. 411.

** «Abstractionism did not satisfy me, after 1960 I wanted to tell stories in my paintings.», in idem, p. 210.