5 poems by the Portuguese plastic artist Mário Cesariny
The poet and artist Mário Cesariny
Militant and staunch supporter of the Surrealist movement, Mário Cesariny de Vasconcelos (1923-2006) wrote, painted and drew, in exactly this order, from the age of 19. His work, both poetic and plastic, contributes to the construction of contemporary history. The painter stood out in the artistic panorama by rejecting any technical and formal concerns, having been the first to create a surrealist collage in post-war Portugal. His career was intense, with the two areas, visual arts and writing, continually interconnecting, as his poems gave rise to paintings and vice versa.
Published the first book, Visible Body (1950), a year after the creation of the group The Surrealists. Other publications followed, the majority after April 25, 1974 - Discourse on the Rehabilitation of the Everyday Reality (1952), Sleight of Hand (1956), capital punishment (1957), between others.His literary and plastic works stand out for their richness and complexity for the surrealist movement:
“As one of the main critics and theorists of the surrealist movement, throughout his career he maintained numerous literary polemics, both against surrealism's detractors and against those who, in literary practice, distorted it. His poetic work began by reflecting, in visible body or Discourse on the Rehabilitation of the Everyday Reality, the taste for ironic observation of urban reality which, echoing Cesário Verde, still constitutes an insignificant phase compared to volumes close to surrealist practice such as Sleight of Hand. There, the mordacity and the absurd, the use of the unusual, allied to a discursivity that rarely embarks on a radical nonsense, as in the work of António Maria Lisboa, allow to establish, like no other author of the 50s, a point of balance between early modernism and the surrealist revolution.”
Discover part of his vast poetic work through the five excerpts published in this article:
I find you in every street
I find you in every street
I lose you in every street
I know your body so well
I dreamed so much of your figure
that it is with my eyes closed that I walk
to limit your height
and drink the water and sip the air
that pierced your waist
So close so real
that my body transforms
and plays its own element
in a body that is no longer yours
in a river that disappeared
where an arm of yours seeks me
I find you in every street
I lose you in every street
Mário Cesariny em capital punishment
Pastry shop
After all, what matters is not literature
neither art criticism nor the darkroom
After all, what matters is not the business
nor having money next to having hours of leisure
After all, what matters is not being young and gallant
- he has so many ways to compose a bookcase!
After all, what matters is not to be afraid: close your eyes in front of the precipice
and fall vertically into addiction
Isn't it true, boy? And tomorrow there's a ball
before there was cinema madame blanche and parola
After all, what matters is not that people are hungry
because just like that there are still a lot of people who eat
After all, what matters is not to be afraid
to call the manager and say very loudly in front of a lot of people:
Manager! This milk is sour!
After all, what matters is putting up the collar of the furry one
outside the patisserie, and outside - oh, outside! - laugh at everything
In the admirable laughter of those who know and like
have had their teeth washed and lots of white teeth showing
Mário Cesariny in Discourse on the Rehabilitation of the Everyday Reality
A Great Tool of Love
a great tool of love
half an orange of joy
ten tons of sweat
a minute of geometry
four heartless rhymes
two disasters without novelty
a black man who goes to the sertão
a white man who comes to town
a sock in the sun
five days of anguish in the forum
the cigarette going down the magazine
the trepanning of the bull
a thousand mouths to see and tell
a height of sightseeing
a ripping skyscraper
half-quarter of christianity
a plank without a door without a ladder
a griffin in the lines of the hand
a very unhappy Iberia
a Rossio of solitude
Mário Cesariny in Discourse on the Rehabilitation of the Everyday Reality
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