Artist Manuel Baptista died this Saturday in Lisbon at the age of 87, João Pinharanda, artistic director of the Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology (MAAT), told Lusa in a statement.
Joaquim Manuel Guerreiro Baptista was born in Faro, in 1936, and graduated in painting in Lisbon, in 1962, at the School of Fine Arts, where he taught for a brief period, said the director of MAAT. “Gulbenkian Foundation scholarship holder in Paris, in 1963, and of the Italian institute, in Ravenna, in 1968, he also spent long periods in the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), where, from 1977 to 1980, he established significant relationships with collectors and galleries ”, he indicated, underlining that, “in Portugal, [the work of Manuel Baptista] is part of all the major museum collections, and [he] maintained constant activity in the gallery universe”.
Dividing his time between Lisbon and Faro, he developed in that Algarve city “an important artistic and pedagogical mission when he directed, in the 1990s, two municipal galleries, Trem and Arco, presenting a wide range of historical and young artists”. “Several national awards (Soquil, 1970; Arus, 1982; Bienal de Cerveira, 1984; BANIF, 1993) and some anthological and retrospective exhibitions of his work (Loulé, 1988; SNBA, 1990; or Casa da Cerca, Almada, 1996) were guaranteeing its recognition”, continued one of the veterans of curating and criticizing Portuguese art.
Pinharanda highlighted that Manuel Baptista received, in 2012, the Autores Prize, attributed by the Portuguese Society of Authors (SPA) to the exhibition presented at the Electricity Museum (currently MAAT), of the EDP Foundation, and that “this exhibition revealed an unknown facet of his work, realizing sculpture and installation projects from the 1960s and 1970s and providing a new critical dimension to his work, close to international Pop in themes (everyday objects), materials (neon, plexiglass, metal) and scale (with solutions that justified the title of the exhibition: 'Out of scale'”.
“His work is multiple and difficult to classify: it developed in the field of painting, drawing and installation, in a permanent tension between Figuration and Non-figuration, between landscaping and an almost Pop fascination with everyday life”, he observed. “The cliffs of his native Algarve could be thought of as huge, festive sculptures or structures revealed in somber drawings; overlapping cutouts could reveal themselves as subtle windows on a plant world; the simplest forms of geometry could develop into monochrome paintings (circles, pentagons, triangles), but where the surface was enriched by successive layers of cutouts constituting delicate reliefs and shading, or the semicircles become delicate and complex fans”, described. According to João Pinharanda, Manuel Baptista was preparing, for next July, a new global retrospective of his work, at the Faro Museum and at the Trem gallery. “Its implementation will confirm the importance and uniqueness of his work”, he concluded.