Vespeira’s accession to the Surrealist movement in 1947 saw the artist’s work take on a tone that was simultaneously ironic and erotic, and is evident in both his paintings and objects. While his paintings reveal a more overt formal, luminous and chromatic sensuality, his objects are particularly replete with irony and sarcasm, allowing the artist to express his distrust and dislike of the ruling power. An example of this is his sculpture Menino Imperativo (Imperative Boy) (1952), exhibited for the first time in what was also his first solo exhibition, at the Casa Jalco, a furniture house in Chiado, Lisbon, which opened its doors to Vespeira, Fernando Lemos and Fernando Azevedo, who held three solo exhibitions there at the same time.

Created in the wake of yet another speech by Salazar, in which the President of the Council mused over the needs of the nation, the Menino Imperativo appears as a manifesto of poetic freedom.

A small, armless mannequin with a conch shell (a metaphor for the wind and freedom) for its head, hushed and spectral in appearance, like a figure escaped from a dream, and with its torso covered in wax and carrying the stump of a candle on its shoulder – which was lit at the 1952 exhibition, heightening its touching, dreamlike quality – stands at the top of a small staircase covered in a dark red carpet. An indefinite figure that seems to invite viewers to a place that only exists in their own imagination, a poetic game based on the bitter political vicissitudes of the time, the Imperative Boy puts the realm of dreams and surrealism above the failure of imagination exhibited by those in power.

Emília Ferreira
March 2013