Who is it José de Guimarães?
José de Guimarães, the artist who adopted the name of the city where he was born as a pseudonym (his full name is José Maria Fernandes Marques), became one of the main Portuguese visual artists, whose career expanded beyond borders in a truly admirable way – in other words , José de Guimarães He is one of the rare Portuguese artists whose international career is more important than his national one. His artistic vocation emerged in 1967, when he went to work as a military engineer. The first steps in the world of arts were inspired by the artistic manifestations of African culture and Pop Art. Other influences range from the baroque style of Rubens, to the abstractionism of Klee and Kandinsky. Painter, sculptor, collector and amateur anthropologist created his own style, whether with the alphabet created or the works that represent the great fascination of José de Guimarães by non-Western cultures - among them Angola, Mexico and Japan, and by the creations of Man. For several decades, José de Guimarães has crossed non-verbal relationships in his work. In each figure, symbol, texture and color, there are very unique characteristics that create a creative reading of his art and of African, Chinese and Mesoamerican civilizations. Discover five fantastic works that explain the career of José de Guimarães.
5 WORKS OF ART
Inspired by the adventures of Portuguese navigators and the life of the poet Luís de Camões, José de Guimarães created 16 lithographs. Each tells a story or represents an indispensable figure in the history of Portugal, from the first king of Portugal, D.Afonso Henriques, to the love story of D.Inês.
Sand Drawings
This series reflects the influence of African art, mainly the culture of the Quiocos of Northeast Angola in the works of the Portuguese artist. These works appear in his imagination through the influence of drawings drawn on the floor during conversations, synthetic ideograms of mental and symbolic schemes.
Hong Kong
In this Hong Kong series, the influence of Chinese aesthetics and calligraphy is noticeable. The artist himself said: «My first contact with Japan was due to a mere professional relationship, and almost at the same time I was contacted by the Goethe Institut in Osaka to build kites (...) my interest in Asian culture , namely Japanese and Chinese, began when I began my first contacts with the East in 1988. From that time on I began to introduce elements and archetypes from these cultures into my own work (...) I began to be interested in Chinese poetry from the dynasties Tang and Song and by Hokusai (especially his erotic art), with significant importance in the Hong Kong series»
Nuno Faria wrote in the catalog for the exhibition "Negreiros e Guaranis - José de Guimarães" about Negreiros works: “Starting from the author’s extraordinary collection of primitive African art, certainly one of the most relevant in the Portuguese panorama, what we propose is to reactivate these nexus, these connections, a radical form of alterity that is established in the relationship between the viewer and the works in dialogue .” (…) With this apparently simple displacement operation, a connection is established between the negative and the positive, the form and its emptiness, which opens up a space for the materialization of absence through presence and vice versa, enabling internal representation absentia or in the negative, the principle of otherness. (…) This geometry of encounter, in a precarious balance, proposes a metaphor, a semantic transport: distance and proximity are abstract and cultural notions that we are able to transpose or deconstruct through the empirical exercise of contact with things, the experience of the world . It is this movement of approximation, this groping, sometimes without distance, without the mediation of vision, that constitutes the modus operandi of José de Guimarães, its ethics of intervention.”
African Alphabet, 1970-1974
Between 1970 and 1974, the Angolan period took place in which a new language was acquired, influenced by ideographic thinking, typical of African tribal culture. The African Alphabet series appears as “learning a language based on a cosmogonic richness, a permanent reinvention of the founding myth and not reified or mediated by the word (...) From learning African art, in its primitive, ritualistic and initiatory form, the artist took what is vocabulary, the basis of all his work, whose grammar, operating through the articulation of recurring fragments in combinatorial possibilities, refers to ideographic language typical of an oral matrix culture that operates through direct, objectual and metaphorical transmission and exchange. The ideograms, the use of the symbol, the clear form, normally translated into negative through the use of the silhouette, have become, more than an important form of recognition, the possibility of overcoming a dialectical and rhetorical vision of the world.”
