A predilection for working in series and a monochromatic tendency are two of the characteristics of Fernando Calhau’s work that can be directly related to the sustained focus on printmaking which marked his early his artistic career. Indeed, building on an exploration sensitive to the principles of multiplication inherent to Pop Art, and informed above all by the serial proposals of minimalism – which were a clear reference, as would become increasingly evident in his work –, it was through printmaking that, from the end of the 1960s, the artist began to explore the use of reproduction and repetition in his work.

It is, to a certain extent, this insistence on a single project, and a single process, that can be identified in the series of watercolours produced in 1980, in which, amongst the dilution of forms, different landscapes can be glimpsed. Using a limited palette of earth tones, to which blue or grey are occasionally added, these watercolours are stains of colour which demonstrate a sustained exploration of the aqueous potential of the technique employed and which in a constant, yet subtle, progression, frequently exhibit minimal variations from one to another.

MBA

October 2011