Who was the Portuguese artist Jorge Martins?
Continuing the artistic journey that our Gallery raises, this is another name that calls our attention due to the fact that we have represented it in available work and, above all, because it fits our concern – which is nothing more than a form of our cultural interest – with publicizing routes that break routines and avoid the static attitude of mere possession for the sake of possession.
We are convinced that aesthetic expression, whatever form it takes to manifest itself, is not an end in itself, exhausted. It is not the end of a cycle, but the beginning of as many as our analysis is able to uncover. It's a challenge! Helping us with the words of Jorge Martins, because "Art is faster than theory.” "Drawing is seeing in the dark."
From 1958 to 1961, Jorge Martins da Engraving (Cooperative Society of Portuguese Engravers) on his way to Paris, passing through group exhibitions (highlighting theII Plastic Arts Exhibition of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation), began building the path that still characterizes it today. The multiple circumstances of Portugal in the 50s and 60s and his experience as an artist in the process of asserting himself motivated him to leave for a long 13 years. not lookingcosmopolitanism so used for curricular ornamentation… acquire experience and knowledge with Maria Helena Vieira da Silva and Arpad Szenes, Lourdes Castro, Júlio Pomar and René Bertholo. He is awarded with prizes and becomes a collaborator, in Portugal, of “Galeria 111”, in Sweden of “Galerie Borjeson” and in France of “Galerie Bellechasse”.
In 1975 he moved to New York. In 1978, he exhibited at the “Musée National d'Art Moderne”, better known as the “Centro Pompidou”.
In 1985, he was part of the representation of Portugal at the “XVIII Bienal de S. Paulo”, with Jorge Molder, exhibited at the “Centro de Arte Moderna” of the Gulbenkian Foundation, where he exhibited again in 1988, the year in which he also exhibited in Brussels and Paris. In 1991, at the “Valentine de Carvalho Gallery”, in 1993 again at the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, in a sequence of exhibitions at the “Galeria Luís Serpa”, at the “Corcoran Gallery of Art” and at the “Galeria Fernando Santos”.
At the end of the 1990s, 2001 saw the exhibition of “Culturgest” and the beginning of a tour that traveled throughout Brazil, exhibiting in Rio de Janeiro (National Museum of Fine Arts), in S. Paulo (Pinacoteca do Estado de S. Paulo ) and in Brasília (Caixa Económica Federal Gallery).
From the retrospective at the “Museu Colecção Berardo” in 2006 we arrived at the“The Substance of Time” in Serralves from March to June 2013 simultaneously in Lisbon at the “Fundação Carmona e Costa”.
This was the largest retrospective of Jorge Martins' work ever held. We cannot resist, therefore, reproducing what was then contained in the presentation published by the “Serralves Foundation”:
“In Serralves, more than two hundred works created between 1965 and 2012 will be on display, revealing the constant appropriation of everyday elements and an exhaustive research on the modes of representation, namely on the way in which light reinvents space and objects. . Mostly abstract and colorless, the drawings presented make up a language rich in textures, intensities and gradations that unfolds in continuous variations.”