Untitled (Ladies at a table), dates from around 1919, and is the best-known of the small-scale paintings from Cristiano Cruz's final phase. This painting goes beyond a sketch and is the result of directly applying vigorous brush strokes to the canvas and of the expressionist technique that is associated with his return from France after the war. It creates a contrast between cold and dark tones – dirty blues, greys, and whites – and the hot red of lips and make-up, and shows a combination of a seductive yet cruel worldly life (a theme that is unusual in his works). The representation of two women at a café table does not aim to inspire a passive contemplation of bourgeois life; rather it delineates a tragic cult of sentiment: the image's tactile quality encompasses the artist's brutal gestures, the gazes back at the onlookers, something going on outside the frame of the picture, a pistol shape formed with fingers, the consumption of alcohol and the smudged make-up of the two sordid and restless figures.

 

As if Cristiano's old caricatures had come to life, the presence, pain and experience of this tense figuration, which is created with an excessive materiality reminiscent of the work of Oskar Kokoschka and Egon Schiele, is overshadowed by the destruction and hedonism of the post-war era. It is an apocalyptic vision of the world that was without rival in modernist Portuguese painting in the decade post-1910. It was aligned with a radical anti-decorative and anti-naturalistic artistic language that articulated angles and edges in the flûtes, and bony, almost skull-like features of the two figures and the over-turned table, organising them into delineated fields of colour, and in the case of the white skirts, almost reached the limits of abstraction.

 

 

Afonso Ramos

March 2013

 

* See Christiano Cruz (1892-1951), Retrospectiva, Museu Rafael Bordalo Pinheiro, 1993, p. 55.