Sem Título (Untitled)
When crossing the threshold of Centro de Artes Visuais, the gallery visitor vacates the everyday of Coimbra for the "screaming light and color" of António Palolo's pop art of the Sixties and Seventies.
António Palolo was one of the most brilliant pop artists of Portugal, says the curator. He left an indelible mark on Portuguese painting, reports Expresso (August 8). The Popalolo exhibit ends on Sunday, September 15. Centro de Artes Visuais, Pátio da Inquisição, 10, opens at 2 p.m. and closes at 7 p.m., Tuesday through Sunday.
"(Palolo's painting) is realized in the authenticity of a pictorial language expressed in the visual impact of contrasting colors, arranged across bright strips of a virtuoso spectacle. An example of meticulous detail . . . screaming light and color . . . amusingly childish and absolutely rigorous, Palolo's painting lives off its contradictions," curator Miguel von Hafe Pérez says in the show's program, quoting from a 1971 catalogue of Galeria Zen.
António Palolo (Évora 1946 - Lisbon 2000) uses acrylic, gouache, watercolor and Indian ink on paper, oil on canvas, serigraph silkscreen. Whatever the material, all 50 pieces, hung on both sides of two aisles, highlight the artist's attention to detail and disciplined drawing.
Such a demanding burst of work, most of which is privately owned, sets the gallery visitor's head on fire with questions about the artist's intent. There are few clues for answers. With the exception of Évora II, António Palolo's individual work is untitled (Sem Título).
Then, the visitor sits in a darkened aisle to watch the film, A. Palolo: Ver e Pensamento a Correr (Seeing the Thought Running) (1995), which reveals the self-taught artist's later figurative work, a peek at his film work (Lines, 1980) and his association with painters Joaquim Bravo (Évora 1935 - Lagos 1990), Álvaro Lapa (Évora 1939 - Porto 2006) and António Areal (Porto 1934 - Lisbon 1978).
To accompany an anthological exhibit of Palolo's work at Centro de Arte Moderna (CAM), the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation invited thespian Jorge Silva Melo (1948-2022) to direct the film, his first of many documentaries about artists, reported Diário de Notícias (March 15, 2022). In an eye-opening 42 minutes, French surrealist artist Marcel Duchamp reads from The Creative Act (1957):
"An artist sees his way out of a clearing. . . . All his decisions rest with pure intuition and cannot be translated into a self-analysis, spoken or written, or even thought out."
So, stop asking why and keep looking, the visitor says to herself, as the film closes with the artist painting swaths of blue to the sounds of a jazz drum solo and then saxophonist John Coltrane.
António Palolo died at the age of 54, after battling cancer for two years, according to Público (January 30, 2000):
"His painting was immediate and revealing: a theory of light and color that, in its succession of phases, referred to the realities of the different moments of his life. That is why his practices moved from abstraction to figuration and back again to abstraction, without each of the languages rejecting or surpassing each other. A journey that was interrupted yesterday, like the closing of eyes."
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