Who is the artist who represented Portugal at the Venice Biennale?
José Pedro Croft is one of the great figures of contemporary Portuguese sculpture. Its simple, practically minimalist structures develop a complex relationship with the viewer's perception. He exhibits regularly since 1981, having held his first solo exhibition in 1983 at the Galeria do Diário de Notícias. The time you worked for João Cutileiro was a determining factor in the development of his artistic practice. He represented Portugal several times at the Venice Biennale and his works are in the collections of the Center Georges Pompidou in France, the Serralves Foundation, the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum, the Secretary of State for Culture, the Museum of Modern Art in Rio de Janeiro, among others.
José Pedro Croft and master João Cutileiro
José Pedro Croft was born in 1957 in Porto, but currently lives and works in Lisbon.Between 1976 and 1981, he attended the painting course at the Escola Superior de Belas Artes in Lisbon. During the 1980s, he worked withJoão Cutileiro, thus being influenced to create sculptures mainly in stone, which referred to the tradition of funerary sculpture. As the artist himself revealed:
“João Cutileiro he was like a master for me, he provided me with good technical training. So I made my first exhibition: a series of monkeys on stone pedestals, which were, in reality, modeling exercises. Minimalism was something I came into contact with when I was already at school, but only in books. It was, for me, both cryptic and fascinating.”
The glass and the mirror in the sculptures ofJosé Pedro Croft
From 1980 he began to explore other elements such as plaster and bronze, representing basic everyday utensils. In the following decade, stone work was abandoned, increasingly incorporating the use of simple and geometric shapes and introducing the materials, associated with his work until today, transparent glass, mirror and bronze. This is how the Portuguese artist became known for his sculptures made with industrial materials, such as wood and metal, with glass and mirror surfaces, where strong vibrant paints are often applied that establish an intense play of light that creates tension between the work and the space where it is located. is exposed. Through an economy of means, his sculptures combine the material nature of the object with its formal aspect, using the effect of light, shadow and reflection in order to create new volumes and change the perception of the surrounding space. This view is strengthened from other means such as the use of industrial paint, thus giving the perception of embossed painting. Architectural compositions, whether three-dimensional or flat on paper, are always built on delicately balanced forms and on the dichotomy of positive and negative space which, for the Portuguese artist, “reflects the transience of the universe”. In the words of the José Pedro Croft, the interest of their practice: “resides in its nuances and small differences, and not in the attempt to fit it into a certain line of work”.
In drawing and painting, three-dimensionality is approached through a very simple shape, the rectangle. As the artist himself stated in an interview with Rui Jorge Martins:
“In 2002, on the occasion of a retrospective at the Centro Cultural de Belém, in Lisbon, I started to look at all the work I had done over 20 years and realized that, whether it was drawing or sculpture, I had always been working in rectangles or boxes. Suddenly, everything became clear. It was like choosing a rectangle to talk about everything. I work with that geometric shape, but I could be talking about ethics.”
From two-dimensional to three-dimensional: sculpture, drawing and engraving
In the artistic path ofJosé Pedro Croft, sculpture, drawing and prints are languages that complement each other. In two-dimensional and three-dimensional works, the spatial issues are the same: repetition, points of tension and stability, weight, density, recombination of compositional solutions, additive processes, subtractive processes, migration from two-dimensional practices to three-dimensional practices (and vice versa), use of specific materials from two-dimensional and three-dimensional fields. On this subject the artist refers: “When I work in two dimensions, I work in engraving or drawing; and I work on exactly the same spatial issues that I work on sculpture”.
Currently, the work ofJosé Pedro Croft is widely known for his reduced geometric sculptures and paintings. We thus realize that the Portuguese artist is a sculptor par excellence and that all of his work, whether in sculpture, engraving or drawing, is intrinsically interconnected. His works can be found in several institutions and in theP55.
