Eduardo Batarda, «Great Moments — Eduardo Batarda nos Anos Setenta»

Eduardo Batarda_Great Moments.qxp:documenta 28/09/20 14:41 Page 1

Eduardo Batarda_Great Moments.qxp:documenta 28/09/20 14:41 Page 1

Eduardo Batarda_Great Moments.qxp:documenta 28/09/20 14:41 Page 2

Eduardo Batarda_Great Moments.qxp:documenta 28/09/20 14:41 Page 3

G R E AT M O M E N T S Eduardo Batarda nos Anos Setenta Eduardo Batarda in the 1970s

Eduardo Batarda_Great Moments.qxp:documenta 28/09/20 14:41 Page 4

Eduardo Batarda_Great Moments.qxp:documenta 28/09/20 14:41 Page 5

Este livro foi publicado por ocasião da exposição «Great Moments. Eduardo Batarda nos Anos Setenta», de Eduardo Batarda, com curadoria de João Mourão e Luís Silva, realizada na Fundação Arpad Szenes-Vieira da Silva de 1 de Outubro de 2020 a 17 de Janeiro de 2021, em parceria com a Fundação Carmona e Costa.

This book was published on the occasion of Eduardo Batarda’s exhibition “Great Moments. Eduardo Batarda in the 1970s”, curated by João Mourão and Luís Silva, shown at the Arpad Szenes-Vieira da Silva Foundation from 1 October 2020 to 17 January 2021, in partnership with the Carmona e Costa Foundation.

Eduardo Batarda_Great Moments.qxp:documenta 29/09/20 12:43 Page 6

© Eduardo Batarda, 2020 textos [texts] © Catarina Rosendo, João Mourão, Luís Silva © Sistema Solar Crl (Documenta) Rua Passos Manuel 67 B, 1150-258 Lisboa ISBN: 978-989-9006-52-2 Outubro [ October] 2020 Tradução [Translation]: José Gabriel Flores Revisão [Proofreading]: Helena Roldão, Sandra Santos Fotografias [Photographs ]: António Jorge Silva, pp. 43, 45, 47, 49, 53, 61, 79, 85, 89, 91, 93, 99, 105, 107, 113, 121, 123 Cortesia Galeria 111, pp. 55, 57, 59, 63, 65, 67, 69, 71, 73, 83, 101, 111, 127 Estúdio Julião Sarmento, p. 51 Filipe Braga, © Fundação de Serralves, pp. 75, 87, 95, 97, 103, 109, 125 José Manuel Costa Alves, pp. 77, 81 José Manuel Costa Alves, © Museu Calouste Gulbenkian – Coleção Moderna, pp. 115, 117, 119 Depósito legal [Legal deposit ]: 474805/20 Impressão e acabamento [Printing and binding ]: Gráfica Maiadouro SA Rua Padre Luís Campos 586 e 686 (Vermoim), 4471-909 Maia

Eduardo Batarda_Great Moments.qxp:documenta 28/09/20 14:41 Page 7

EXPOSIÇÃO [EXHIBITION ]

fundação arpad szenes-vieira da silva

Curadoria [Curators] João Mourão, Luís Silva

Conselho de Administração [Board of Directors] António Gomes de Pinho – Presidente [President] João Corrêa Nunes – Vice-Presidente [Vice-President] Simonetta Luz Afonso Rita Faden José Manuel dos Santos Raquel Henriques da Silva Vera Nobre da Costa

Coordenação [Coordination] Sandra Santos

Director [Director] Marina Bairrão Ruivo

Comunicação [Media Department ] Inês Eva Produção [Production] Sandra Quintas Sofia Sutre Equipa de montagem [Display Staff ] António José Pereira Carlos Nogueira Renato Santos

fundação carmona e costa Conselho Geral [General Board ] Maria da Graça Dias Coelho Carmona e Costa Conselho de Administração [Board of Directors] Maria da Graça Dias Coelho Carmona e Costa – Presidente [President ] António Dias Coelho Álvaro Carmona e Costa Portela José Amaro Martins Carmona e Costa Administradora Executiva [Executive Director] Maria da Graça Dias Coelho Carmona e Costa Assessor para a Programação Cultural [Advisor for Cultural Programming] Pedro Valdez

Design BECO

Eduardo Batarda_Great Moments.qxp:documenta 28/09/20 14:41 Page 8

Eduardo Batarda_Great Moments.qxp:documenta 28/09/20 14:41 Page 9

G R E AT M O M E N T S Eduardo Batarda nos Anos Setenta

textos [texts]

Marina Bairrão Ruivo Catarina Rosendo Eduardo Batarda João Mourão Luís Silva

D O C U M E N TA

Eduardo Batarda_Great Moments.qxp:documenta 28/09/20 14:41 Page 10

Eduardo Batarda_Great Moments.qxp:documenta 28/09/20 14:41 Page 11

Great Moments.

Eduardo Batarda nos Anos Setenta

Um grande momento: uma exposição de Eduardo Batarda, na rentrée da Fundação Arpad Szenes-Vieira da Silva, com curadoria de João Mourão e Luís Silva. A parceria institucional com a Fundação Carmona e Costa permite agora mostrar a obra de Eduardo Batarda, no seguimento da opção programática de expor artistas contemporâneos de relevo no panorama da arte portuguesa.

Este momento — esta exposição — não teria sido possível sem a partilha de Eduardo Batarda com os curadores, sem a generosidade dos coleccionadores que cederam as obras e sem a amizade e a cumplicidade de Maria da Graça Carmona e Costa, que integra o Conselho de Patronos da FASVS e sempre apoiou incondicionalmente os artistas.

A exposição de Eduardo Batarda reúne um momento fundamental da prática do artista, o trabalho realizado quase exclusivamente em aguarela e tinta-da-china sobre papel durante a década de setenta, e traça um percurso por um corpo de trabalho que prolonga o tipo de figuração, cromatismo e humor de trabalhos de anos anteriores, recorrendo de forma explícita à ironia e ao sarcasmo e insistindo em tópicos porventura escandalosos de índole sexual, bem como multiplicando alusões literárias e comentários à actualidade do país (J. Mourão, L. Silva).

A obra de Eduardo Batarda, tal como a de outros artistas portugueses da sua geração, resultou também da emigração artística nos anos 1960 e 70 para o Reino Unido (caso de Batarda), França e Alemanha.

Um momento da obra de Eduardo Batarda que a parceria institucional com a Fundação Carmona e Costa permite agora mostrar, numa criteriosa selecção de trabalhos do artista pelos curadores.

Marina Bairrão Ruivo Directora do Museu Arpad Szenes-Vieira da Silva

11

Eduardo Batarda_Great Moments.qxp:documenta 28/09/20 14:41 Page 12

Eduardo Batarda_Great Moments.qxp:documenta 28/09/20 14:41 Page 13

Em fins de Agosto de 2017, foi-me descoberta mais uma doença, e os efeitos das suas terapias deixaram-me em boa parte impossibilitado de trabalhar. Isto era coisa que eu tinha até aí vindo a fazer em bom ritmo, na sequência da minha exposição que abriu em 8 de Novembro de 2016 no MAAT, Misquoteros. Ainda tinha tido ou viria a ter duas individuais, Descrições de Imagens, 1 (2017) e Descrições de Imagens, 2 (2018), respectivamente no Porto e em Lisboa.

As reacções a estas mostras foram em grande parte de indiferença, quando não de escárnio, e apenas a exposição de 2017-18, organizada pelo Julião Sarmento, que em Santiago de Compostela agregou à sua Mise en Abyme os Misquoteros, pareceu merecer algum interesse por parte do público galego.

O texto e o subtexto dos Misquoteros pareciam bem mais premonitórios do que eu estava a contar, eles que lidavam entre outras coisas com a exaustão, a velhice, o isolamento e a desistência do final de vida.

Foi por isso uma surpresa e uma grande satisfação, em 2019, o convite e a proposta por parte da Fundação Arpad Szenes-Vieira da Silva de realizar em 2020 uma exposição de trabalhos meus. Sem poder dedicar-me a actividades intensas nos seus preparativos, foi com muita gratidão que vi o João Mourão e o Luís Silva aceitarem a curadoria do projecto, e com igual gratidão que soube ter a Fundação Carmona e Costa — com a qual eu nunca antes tinha tido a honra de colaborar — decidido apoiar a exposição, e, exactamente, o seu planeamento e a sua curadoria. À Direcção da Fundação Arpad Szenes-Vieira da Silva, e em particular à sua Directora, Marina Bairrão Ruivo; à Fundação Carmona e Costa, na pessoa de Maria da Graça Carmona e Costa; e aos dois curadores, bem como à Catarina Rosendo, por eles convidada para escrever um texto de introdução — 13

Eduardo Batarda_Great Moments.qxp:documenta 28/09/20 14:41 Page 14

a todos agradeço esta oportunidade. Agradeço, está visto, aos coleccionadores, e aproveito para lembrar que há uma certa percentagem do meu trabalho desta época (bem como o de outras) que em maior ou menor medida está ilocalizável. É quase único na minha carreira este ensejo para revisitar uma década de trabalho. Para mais de há quase cinquenta anos. Deve ser dito que, na generalidade, foi a escala destes trabalhos, mais compatível com as salas escolhidas pela Fundação Arpad Szenes-Vieira da Silva, o principal factor decisivo para a sua escolha. São peças que convidam o espectador a uma leitura próxima, de pormenor, e demorada.

São trabalhos verdadeiramente de outra era, que tinham sido expostos em Lisboa pela última vez em 1998, e que foram expostos no Porto em 2011.

Todas as iniciativas de tornar a mostrar o meu trabalho do passado foram retrospectivas ou antológicas. Esta fixa-se num só período, um período em que o vídeo despontava como arte, em que os computadores eram monstros guardados pelas empresas, em que quase tudo era, como veio a dizer-se um pouco mais tarde, analógico. E na rectaguarda das artes plásticas havia gente como eu, empenhada em trabalhos manuais que já eram motivo de alguma troça. É particularmente notável saber que a Fundação Arpad Szenes-Vieira da Silva e a Fundação Carmona e Costa persistiram no projecto durante e apesar da pandemia. Que nos protejam os cuidados extraordinários que a todos são pedidos. A todos, prudência, respeito e saúde. E, se conseguirem, divirtam-se com estas antiguidades.

Eduardo Batarda

14

Eduardo Batarda_Great Moments.qxp:documenta 28/09/20 14:41 Page 15

Manual de Sobrevivência do Observador Incauto das Pinturas de Eduardo Batarda: Algumas Notas Catarina Rosendo Folheio alguns livros de Eduardo Batarda, catálogos de exposição com reproduções de página inteira de obras suas, acompanhadas de ensaios mais ou menos longos e comentários mais ou menos descritivos e/ou interpretativos sobre o que estou a ver — da autoria de curadores, críticos, historiadores da arte e do próprio artista. Atento, em particular, nas obras que agora temos oportunidade de voltar a ver na Fundação Arpad Szenes-Vieira da Silva, e que se concentram, grosso modo, na produção do artista correspondente à década de 1970. Observo-as. Ensaio o seguinte ponto de partida: nada sei sobre estas pinturas nem sobre as gerais intenções artísticas deste pintor. Persigo uma perspectiva ingénua, um primeiro olhar, mas não é possível desligar-me do aparato teórico e histórico que, nas últimas décadas, me moldou a visão dos objectos e dos fenómenos artísticos. Talvez, ao invés de uma abordagem ingénua, possa tentar somente um olhar chão, deliberada e diametralmente oposto à exuberância das obras de Batarda dos anos 1970, um olhar que me faça perceber como é chegar a estas pinturas pela primeira vez, pois é disso que também trata uma exposição: fazer que se olhe como se fosse a primeira vez para alguma coisa, encenar um olhar inaugural.

Observo, então. E vejo, logo de imediato, a saturação do suporte com imagens e palavras, com a excepção daquela pequena série, de 1971, onde praticamente nada parece estar representado a não ser umas linhas que emolduram a tela do quadro e a atravessam obliquamente; ou, então, a lisura das cores, o modo como (enfim, não sempre) uma cor termina no ponto onde começa outra; o frequente domínio do azul (muitas vezes o azul-manganés) sobre todas as outras cores; a criação de espaços mais ou menos cenográficos que se estruturam e intrincam de tal maneira que já não sei se o que vejo é a representação tridimensional de algum lugar ou apenas o delírio, no plano, de sugestões de 15

Eduardo Batarda_Great Moments.qxp:documenta 28/09/20 14:41 Page 16

lugares; uma infinita galeria de figuras caricaturais, por vezes meio gente meio bicho, de diferentes escalas e proporções, fundindo-se e cruzando-se com outras figuras e com o fundo até deixarmos de perceber onde começam uns e acabam os outros, quase todos envergando as indumentárias estereotipadas dos militares, dos marinheiros, dos artistas e das putas; objectos das mais variadas proveniências e com todo o tipo de funções, como cavaletes de pintura, alicates usados na tortura de corpos, teclados de piano, robustos mecanismos inventados que parecem servir para a locomoção de objectos e pessoas; fragmentos de corpos humanos, como braços empunhando facas, órgãos sexuais masculinos alinhados em friso, caveiras, cabeças, mandíbulas, narizes; representações cartográficas e geográficas de lugares que podem ser inventados ou não; representações avulsas de pássaros, cenouras, árvores, cactos, vasos com plantas, balas, casas, câmaras de filmar, tractores, bóias, veículos militares, troféus, máquinas registadoras, bebés, castelos, bandeiras… Infinitos os objectos e os elementos pintados e infinitas as relações que criam entre si. Salta à vista a predilecção pela imagem incómoda e obscena, com alguma frequência levada ao extremo da pornografia em que esta, como se não bastasse mostrar-se explícita em sítios que lhe costumam estar proscritos (o quadro, a sala do museu, o catálogo da exposição), surge mediante toda a espécie de distorções físicas e simbólicas de que a imaginação é capaz, percorrendo uma série de práticas, todas distantes da convencional e convencionada sexualidade burguesa, que vão do voyeurismo ao onanismo, mas sempre — sempre — mostrando gente pouco sofisticada, com traços físicos tão grosseiros que é por demais evidente a sua apetência pelas baixas paixões (de acordo, de resto, com as fontes iconográficas e estilísticas oriundas da «baixa cultura» vernacular ou popular que lhe estão na origem). Em suma, acontecem imensas coisas em cada pintura de Batarda e poucas estabelecem uma lógica aparente com as que lhes estão ao lado.

Mas há muita coisa que não consigo ver bem nestas reproduções. Interrogo-me acerca da (im)possibilidade de a página impressa fazer justiça a tudo o que está representado em cada uma destas pinturas. Tiro da gaveta uma lupa e o meu corpo, debruçado sobre a secretária, faz um movimento afim daquele que, no espaço expositivo, faria para se aproximar das pinturas penduradas na 16

Eduardo Batarda_Great Moments.qxp:documenta 28/09/20 14:41 Page 17

parede. A graduação da lupa é insuficiente para ampliar as figuras mais pequenas ou tornar legíveis algumas das palavras e expressões que pontuam a superfície das pinturas, mas bastante para me devolver ao olhar a trama pontilhada da tinta impressa no papel, o que, por si só, esborrata e desfoca os detalhes que eu desejaria ver com precisão para tentar compreender o que tenho diante de mim.

Torna-se óbvio que, sem as ter à nossa frente, as obras de Batarda deste período permanecem largamente imperscrutáveis. (O mesmo se poderá dizer para todos os outros períodos e, já agora, para tantos outros artistas — todos? —, mas esse não é o objecto deste comentário.)

Também se torna óbvio que compreender se refere, neste caso, à vontade de criar uma legibilidade para o estilhaçar dos planos e escalas sobre os quais se atravanca a multidão de figuras e palavras que, inconscientes da sua aparente incongruência, convivem absolutamente à vontade nos ambientes ou cenários ficcionados por Batarda. Compreender corresponde à intenção de procurar a coerência do todo mediante operações de associação significativa tendentes a estabilizar o que se apresenta à minha frente num qualquer encadeado espacial e temporal lógico, ou pelo menos plausível, e que me permita dizer algo como: «Esta obra é sobre…». Pois não é esta a primeira pergunta, «Isto é sobre o quê?», que o observador não iniciado faz quando se vê diante de uma pintura deste tipo? Mais: com os seus códigos próprios, a sua ortodoxia conceptual, a sua ancoragem numa qualquer tradição hermenêutica, o seu arsenal de remissões e alusões e confrontações e comparações, e outras ferramentas que estejam ao dispor ou se verifiquem apropriadas, não é isso mesmo que o observador erudito ou, dito de outro modo, o especialista faz?

Podemos dizer que a construção de sentido, que partilha da mesma pulverização pós-moderna das pinturas de Batarda, é uma outra forma de interpretar que mantém os significantes abertos a uma multiplicidade de sentidos, todos potencialmente pertinentes porque sempre referenciais. Talvez a impossibilidade de elaboração de um discurso normalizador e unívoco sobre as pinturas de Batarda seja um indício que o artista nos oferece para o modo como podemos lidar com as suas obras, nunca buscando respostas nem conclusões, antes aproveitando o processo intuitivo do olhar peripatético, mergulhando 17

Eduardo Batarda_Great Moments.qxp:documenta 28/09/20 14:41 Page 40

Eduardo Batarda_Great Moments.qxp:documenta 28/09/20 14:41 Page 41

OBRAS [WORKS ]

Eduardo Batarda_Great Moments.qxp:documenta 28/09/20 14:41 Page 42

Sem título [Untitled ] (1971) Tinta acrílica sobre tela [Acrylic on canvas], 113 × 82 cm Col. Leonor Silveira, Cascais

42

Eduardo Batarda_Great Moments.qxp:documenta 28/09/20 14:41 Page 43

Eduardo Batarda_Great Moments.qxp:documenta 28/09/20 14:41 Page 44

Sem título [Untitled ] (1971) Tinta acrílica sobre tela [Acrylic on canvas], 113 × 82 cm Col. Leonor Silveira, Cascais

44

Eduardo Batarda_Great Moments.qxp:documenta 28/09/20 14:41 Page 45

Eduardo Batarda_Great Moments.qxp:documenta 28/09/20 14:41 Page 46

Sem título [Untitled ] (1971) Tinta acrílica sobre tela [Acrylic on canvas], 113 × 82 cm Col. particular, Cascais

46

Eduardo Batarda_Great Moments.qxp:documenta 28/09/20 14:41 Page 47

Eduardo Batarda_Great Moments.qxp:documenta 28/09/20 14:41 Page 48

Sem título [Untitled ] (1971) Tinta acrílica sobre tela [Acrylic on canvas], 113 × 82 cm Col. particular, Cascais

48

Eduardo Batarda_Great Moments.qxp:documenta 28/09/20 14:41 Page 49

Eduardo Batarda_Great Moments.qxp:documenta 28/09/20 14:41 Page 50

Portrait of Patrick Caulfield (1972) Tinta acrílica sobre tela [Acrylic on canvas], 61,7 × 61,7 cm Col. particular, Cascais

50

Eduardo Batarda_Great Moments.qxp:documenta 28/09/20 14:41 Page 51

Eduardo Batarda_Great Moments.qxp:documenta 28/09/20 14:41 Page 52

Sem título [Untitled ] (1970) Guache acrílico e colagem sobre papel [Acrylic gouache and collage on paper], 60,5 × 45,5 cm Col. Barbas Lopes, Lisboa

52

Eduardo Batarda_Great Moments.qxp:documenta 28/09/20 14:41 Page 53

Eduardo Batarda_Great Moments.qxp:documenta 28/09/20 14:41 Page 54

Landsc. (1971) Guache acrílico sobre papel [Acrylic gouache on paper], 39,5 × 29 cm Col. Manuel de Brito, Lisboa

54

Eduardo Batarda_Great Moments.qxp:documenta 28/09/20 14:41 Page 55

Eduardo Batarda_Great Moments.qxp:documenta 28/09/20 14:41 Page 56

Sem título [Untitled ] (1971) Guache acrílico sobre papel [Acrylic gouache on paper], 38 × 28,5 cm Col. Manuel de Brito, Lisboa

56

Eduardo Batarda_Great Moments.qxp:documenta 28/09/20 14:42 Page 57

Eduardo Batarda_Great Moments.qxp:documenta 28/09/20 14:42 Page 58

The Hidden Chicken (1972) Tinta-da-china e aguarela sobre papel [Indian ink and watercolour on paper], 59 Ă— 39,5 cm Col. Manuel de Brito, Lisboa

58

Eduardo Batarda_Great Moments.qxp:documenta 28/09/20 14:42 Page 59

Eduardo Batarda_Great Moments.qxp:documenta 28/09/20 14:42 Page 60

La Peinture qui coule, 3 (1972) Tinta-da-china e aguarela sobre papel [Indian ink and watercolour on paper], 39,5 × 29,5 cm Col. Virgínia e João Esteves de Oliveira, Lisboa

60

Eduardo Batarda_Great Moments.qxp:documenta 28/09/20 14:42 Page 61

Eduardo Batarda_Great Moments.qxp:documenta 28/09/20 14:42 Page 62

La Peinture qui coule (cum foot fetishismus) (1972) Tinta-da-china e aguarela sobre papel [Indian ink and watercolour on paper], 76 Ă— 56 cm Col. Manuel de Brito, Lisboa

62

Eduardo Batarda_Great Moments.qxp:documenta 28/09/20 14:42 Page 63

Eduardo Batarda_Great Moments.qxp:documenta 28/09/20 14:42 Page 64

Boecklin (1972) Tinta-da-china e aguarela sobre papel [Indian ink and watercolour on paper ], 78 Ă— 58,5 cm Col. Manuel de Brito, Lisboa

64

Eduardo Batarda_Great Moments.qxp:documenta 28/09/20 14:42 Page 65

Eduardo Batarda_Great Moments.qxp:documenta 28/09/20 14:42 Page 66

Royal Garden Blues (1972) Tinta-da-china e aguarela sobre papel [Indian ink and watercolour on paper ], 59 Ă— 38 cm Col. Manuel de Brito, Lisboa

66

Eduardo Batarda_Great Moments.qxp:documenta 28/09/20 14:42 Page 67

Eduardo Batarda_Great Moments.qxp:documenta 28/09/20 14:42 Page 68

Know Your Enemy (1972) Tinta-da-china e aguarela sobre papel [Indian ink and watercolour on paper ], 58 Ă— 39 cm Col. Manuel de Brito, Lisboa

68

Eduardo Batarda_Great Moments.qxp:documenta 28/09/20 14:42 Page 69

Eduardo Batarda_Great Moments.qxp:documenta 28/09/20 14:42 Page 70

The Red Sheik (1972) Tinta-da-china e aguarela sobre papel [Indian ink and watercolour on paper], 59 Ă— 39 cm Col. Manuel de Brito, Lisboa

70

Eduardo Batarda_Great Moments.qxp:documenta 28/09/20 14:42 Page 71

Eduardo Batarda_Great Moments.qxp:documenta 28/09/20 14:42 Page 72

Salade aux artistes-peintres (1972) Tinta-da-china e aguarela sobre papel [Indian ink and watercolour on paper], 59 Ă— 39 cm Col. Manuel de Brito, Lisboa

72

Eduardo Batarda_Great Moments.qxp:documenta 28/09/20 14:42 Page 73

Eduardo Batarda_Great Moments.qxp:documenta 28/09/20 14:42 Page 74

La Tapisserie française (1972) Tinta-da-china e aguarela sobre papel [Indian ink and watercolour on paper], 39,5 × 49,7 cm Col. Fundação de Serralves — Museu de Arte Contemporânea, Porto. Aquisição em 2000

74

Eduardo Batarda_Great Moments.qxp:documenta 28/09/20 14:42 Page 75

Eduardo Batarda_Great Moments.qxp:documenta 28/09/20 14:42 Page 76

The Raid (Life-Boat Launderette) (1972) Tinta-da-china e aguarela sobre papel [Indian ink and watercolour on paper], 59 × 39 cm Col. FLAD em depósito na Fundação de Serralves — Museu de Arte Contemporânea, Porto.

Depósito em 2011

76

Eduardo Batarda_Great Moments.qxp:documenta 28/09/20 14:42 Page 77

Eduardo Batarda_Great Moments.qxp:documenta 28/09/20 14:42 Page 78

L’Illustration (Manolito) (1973) Tinta-da-china e aguarela sobre papel [Indian ink and watercolour on paper], 78 × 59 cm Col. particular, Lisboa

78

Eduardo Batarda_Great Moments.qxp:documenta 28/09/20 14:42 Page 79

Eduardo Batarda_Great Moments.qxp:documenta 28/09/20 14:41 Page 40

Eduardo Batarda_Great Moments.qxp:documenta 28/09/20 14:41 Page 40

Eduardo Batarda_Great Moments.qxp:documenta 28/09/20 14:42 Page 118

No chão que nem uma seta (1975) Tinta-da-china e aguarela sobre papel [Indian ink and watercolour on paper], 78,5 × 58,5 cm Museu Calouste Gulbenkian — Colecção Moderna, Lisboa

118

Eduardo Batarda_Great Moments.qxp:documenta 28/09/20 14:42 Page 119

Eduardo Batarda_Great Moments.qxp:documenta 28/09/20 14:42 Page 120

Chevron moisi (1978) Tinta-da-china e aguarela sobre papel [Indian ink and watercolour on paper], 38 Ă— 28,5 cm Col. Teresa Sucena Paiva, Lisboa

120

Eduardo Batarda_Great Moments.qxp:documenta 28/09/20 14:42 Page 121

Eduardo Batarda_Great Moments.qxp:documenta 28/09/20 14:42 Page 122

Chevron Australie (1978) Tinta-da-china e aguarela sobre papel [Indian ink and watercolour on paper], 39 Ă— 29 cm Col. particular, Lisboa

122

Eduardo Batarda_Great Moments.qxp:documenta 28/09/20 14:42 Page 123

Eduardo Batarda_Great Moments.qxp:documenta 28/09/20 14:42 Page 124

El Cineasta (1979) Tinta-da-china e aguarela sobre papel [Indian ink and watercolour on paper], 76 × 106 cm Col. Secretaria de Estado da Cultura, em depósito na Fundação de Serralves — Museu de Arte Contemporânea, Porto. Depósito em 1990

124

Eduardo Batarda_Great Moments.qxp:documenta 28/09/20 14:42 Page 125

Eduardo Batarda_Great Moments.qxp:documenta 28/09/20 14:42 Page 126

(Com as) fardas em farrapos (1979-1980) Tinta-da-china e aguarela sobre papel [Indian ink and watercolour on paper], 75,5 Ă— 105,5 cm Col. Manuel de Brito, Lisboa

126

Eduardo Batarda_Great Moments.qxp:documenta 28/09/20 14:42 Page 127

Eduardo Batarda_Great Moments.qxp:documenta 28/09/20 14:42 Page 128

G R E AT M O M E N T S Eduardo Batarda in the 1970s

[ t r a n s l at i o n s ]

Great Moments.

Eduardo Batarda in the 1970s

One great moment: an exhibition by Eduardo Batarda, curated by João Mourão and Luís Silva, ushers in the new season at the Arpad Szenes-Vieira da Silva Foundation. Our institutional partnership with the Carmona e Costa Foundation gives us now the opportunity to showcase the work of Eduardo Batarda, in keeping with our programming guideline of highlighting the work of relevant names of contemporary Portuguese art.

This moment — this exhibition — would not have been possible without Eduardo Batarda’s close collaboration with the curators, without the generosity of the collectors who lent their pieces and without the friendship and support of Maria da Graça Carmona e Costa, a constant and unconditional supporter of artists and a member of the FASVS’s Council of Patrons.

This exhibition by Eduardo Batarda features a founding moment in the artist’s work: the pieces that he executed almost exclusively in watercolours and Indian ink during the 1970s, tracing an itinerary through a body of work that continues to explore the figures, colours and humour of pieces from previous years, explicitly resorting to irony and sarcasm and continuing to explore supposedly scandalous topics of a sexual nature, while piling up literary allusions and commentaries on the Portugal of the time (J. Mourão, L. Silva).

The work of Eduardo Batarda was also the product of circumstances that caused him and other Portuguese artists of his generation to migrate during the 1960s and 1970s to the United Kingdom (in Batarda’s case), France and Germany.

One moment in the work of Eduardo Batarda that our institutional partnership with the Carmona e Costa Foundation now shows to the public, as a judicious selection of his works by the curators.

Marina Bairrão Ruivo Director of the Arpad Szenes-Vieira da Silva Museum

131

In late August 2017, I was diagnosed with a new disease, and the effects of its therapy left me largely unable to work. Until then, I had been working at quite a good pace, in the wake of Misquoteros, an exhibition that opened on 8 November 2016 at MAAT. Two more solo shows would still follow, Image Descriptions, 1 (2017) and Image Descriptions, 2 (2018), respectively in Porto and Lisbon.

By and large, these shows were met with indifference, sometimes with scorn, and only an exhibition in 2017-2018, organised by Julião Sarmento in Santiago de Compostela, where my Misquoteros were displayed together with his Mise en Abyme, seemed to arouse some interest among Galician viewers.

The text and subtext of Misquoteros proved a lot more premonitory than I expected, dealing as they did with such matters as exhaustion, old age, isolation and late-life listlessness.

And so it was with surprise and great joy that, in 2019, I received an invitation from the Arpad Szenes-Vieira da Silva Foundation to present there, in 2020, an exhibition of my work. Being unable to work strenuously in its planning, I was very grateful to see João Mourão and Luís Silva accept the curatorship of the project, and equally grateful when I learned that the Carmona e Costa Foundation — an institution with which I had never worked before — had decided to support the exhibition’s planning and curatorship.

For this opportunity, I wish to thank the Direction of the Arpad Szenes-Vieira da Silva Foundation, particularly its director, Marina Bairrão Ruivo; the Carmona e Costa Foundation, in the person of Maria da Graça Carmona e Costa; and the two curators, as well as Catarina Rosendo, whom they invited to write an introductory essay. I also wish to thank the collectors, of course, and I take this opportunity to point out that a certain percentage 133

of my work from this period (and from others) remains more or less untraceable.

In my career, such a chance to revisit a decade of work is almost unparalleled. Especially pieces done almost fifty years ago. It should be said that the scale of these works, more adequate to the rooms designated by the Arpad Szenes-Vieira da Silva Foundation, was largely the main decisive factor in their selection. They are pieces that invite the viewer to a close, detailed and lengthy viewing.

These works, which truly hail from a different time, had been shown in Lisbon for the last time in 1998, and in Porto in 2011. All events showcasing my work from the past were either retrospectives or anthological exhibitions.

This one focuses on a single period, a time when video was beginning to emerge as an art form, computers were behemoths kept under lock and key by large companies, and nearly everything was, as it became usual to say a little later, analogue. And at the rear of the visual arts there were people like me, dedicating themselves to crafts that were already somewhat a subject of fun.

It is particularly notable to know that the Arpad Szenes-Vieira da Silva Foundation and the Carmona e Costa Foundation have stuck with the project during and in spite of the pandemic. May the extraordinary precautions demanded from all protect us. All of you, please remain prudent, respectful and healthy. And, if you can, please have fun with these antiques.

Eduardo Batarda

134

Survival Handbook for the Casual Viewer of Eduardo Batarda’s Paintings: A Few Notes Catarina Rosendo I leaf through some Eduardo Batarda books, exhibition catalogues with full-page reproductions of his works, accompanied by essays of varying length and more or less descriptive and/or interpretative commentaries on what I am looking at, written by curators, critics, art historians and the artist himself. I pay special attention to the works, largely from the 1970s, that we now have the opportunity to see again at the Arpad Szenes-Vieira da Silva Foundation.

I observe them. I try the following approach: I know nothing about these paintings, nor about the overall artistic intentions of this painter. I pursue a naive mindset, a first gaze, but I find it impossible to disengage myself from the theoretical and historical apparatus that, over the last decades, has shaped my view of artistic objects and phenomena. Perhaps, instead of a naive approach, I might just try a very sober gaze, the deliberate diametrical opposite of the exuberance of Batarda’s works from the 1970s, a gaze that will make me understand how it is to come before these paintings for the first time, because that is also what an exhibition does: it makes us look at something as if for the first time, simulating an inaugural gaze.

So, I observe them. And what immediately strikes me is how every surface is saturated with images and words, with the exception of that small 1971 series where nothing appears to be depicted, apart from a few lines that frame the picture’s canvas and obliquely cross it; or else the smoothness of the colours, the way how (well, not always) a colour ends where another begins; the frequent dominance of blue (usually manganese) over all other colours; the creation of more or less scenographic spaces that structure and entangle themselves to such a point I can no longer know whether what I see is the threedimensional representation of some place or just a delirious depiction of suggestions of places on the plane; an endless gallery of caricatures, sometimes 135

half-human and half-animal, in different scales and proportions, fusing and crossing themselves with other figures and with the background until we no longer can tell where some of them start and others end, nearly all of them wearing the stereotypical accoutrements of soldiers, sailors, artists and whores; many different sorts of objects with all sorts of uses, such as painting easels, pliers for torturing bodies, piano keyboards, sturdy imaginary mechanisms that seem made to transport objects and people; fragments of human bodies, such as arms holding knives, male sex organs lined up as friezes, skulls, heads, jawbones, noses; cartographic and geographic depictions of places that may be imaginary or not; isolated pictures of birds, carrots, trees, cacti, flower pots, bullets, houses, film cameras, tractors, buoys, military vehicles, trophies, cash registers, babies, castles, flags… The painted objects and elements are endless, and so are the relationships between them. Quite obvious is a penchant for disturbing, obscene images, often taken to the extreme of pornography, which, as if the fact that it is being displayed in places that usually do not host it (paintings, museum rooms, exhibition catalogues) was not enough, is subjected to every imaginable physical and symbolic distortion, covering a number of practices that are all quite remote from conventional bourgeois sexuality, ranging from voyeurism to onanism, but always — always — showcasing rather unsophisticated people, with such coarse physical traits that their inclination for the lowest passions is perfectly clear (in keeping, indeed, with the iconographic and stylistic sources from vernacular or popular “lowbrow culture” that are at their root). In short, many things happen in every painting by Batarda and few of them have any sort of logical connection to the ones near them.

But there is much I cannot see properly in these reproductions. I wonder if the printed page can truly do justice to all that is depicted in each one of these paintings. I take a magnifying glass from a drawer; my body, leaning over the desk, performs a movement akin to the one I would execute, while in an exhibition space, in order to come closer to the pictures hanging on the wall.

The lens’ magnifying power is insufficient to enlarge the smaller figures or to make legible some of the words and phrases that are scattered across the surface of the paintings; it can only bring to my view the dots of ink printed on the pa136

per, which by themselves do nothing but smudge and blur the details I would have liked to see with clarity, and thus try to understand what I have before me. It has become obvious that, without having them in front of us, Batarda’s works from this period will remain largely inscrutable. (The same could be said of all other his periods and, by the way, of many other artists — all of them? — but that is not the aim of this text.)

It has also become obvious that what to understand means here is the desire to create a legibility for the shattered planes and scales that are cluttered by the multitude of figures and words that, unaware of their seeming incongruence, interact with the greatest of ease in the environments or sceneries Batarda has fictionalised. To understand amounts to the intention of finding coherence in the whole through significant associations that try to stabilise what I have before me into some spatial and temporal sequence that is logical, or at least plausible, and allows me to say something like: “This piece is about…” Indeed, the first question that comes to the mind of an inexperienced observer when confronted with a painting of this sort is “What is this about?” And more: for all their personal codes, their conceptual orthodoxy, their rooting in some hermeneutical tradition, their arsenal of remissions and allusions and confrontations and comparisons, and other tools that may be within their reach or prove useful, is not precisely this what the erudite viewer or, to use another term, the specialist does? We may say that the construction of meaning, which shares the same postmodern fragmentation as Batarda’s paintings, is another form of interpretation that keeps the signifiers open to a multiplicity of meanings, all of them potentially pertinent, being always referential. Perhaps the very fact that is impossible to create a standardised, univocal discourse about Batarda’s paintings is a clue the artist gives us as to how we could deal with his works, never searching for answers or conclusions, and instead taking the intuitive process of the peripatetic gaze, by plunging into the bulimic voraciousness of the references and embracing the fact that this is a journey without a destination.

The vertigo of visual forms is thus correlative to the vertigo of the complex and intricate system of references, quotes, allusions and suggestions that is 137

present in each painting. Of course, interpretative clues are scattered here and there: the dam that can be seen in the lower half of a work from 1976 is named in the piece’s title (Where the Work Stops [Cahora Bassa]), for instance.

I am tempted to believe that, if I just manage to grasp the references, I will be able to reach the deeper meaning of these paintings. I return to the books, and read carefully what many others before me have already written about these pieces by Batarda. The various explicit or implicit references and influences include several from the visual arts, from the Laocoön statue to a number of less obvious artists connected with Pop art, such as Peter Saul, Jim Nutt and Öyvind Fahlström, to the Mannerist and Baroque paintings and engravings of Bronzino, Arcimboldo, Caravaggio and Bartolozzi, not forgetting Arnold Böcklin and his Isle of the Dead, the modernity of Picasso’s Demoiselles and of Otto Dix, Max Beckmann and George Grosz’s Neue Sachlichkeit, Jackson Pollock’s Abstract Modernist drippings and a clear interest in illustrations and American comics, by such authors as Rudolph Dirks and Harold K. Kneer (The Katzenjammer Kids), George Herriman (Krazy Kat), Robert Crumb, Saul Steinberg (The New Yorker) and Sergio Aragonés (Mad Magazine). His references and influences also extend to erotic iconography, to film (King Kong, Jane Russell), to literature (satirical and lyrical prose, P. C. Wren’s adventure novel Beau Geste, American cut-up literature, French nouveau roman), to music (from Ornette Coleman and John Coltrane’s free jazz to specific tunes by Charles Mingus, Georges Brassens and The Kinks) and to subjects drawn from Portuguese and international history and politics, such as territorial disputes, power usurpations and oppressive strategies (the Siege of the Alamo, Texas, in 1836; the Battle of Marracuene, Mozambique, in 1885; the Kronstadt Rebellion, Petrograd, in 1921; the Beja Attempted Coup, in 1961), figures and organisations such as General Humberto Delgado, General Spínola and the Estado Novo regime, Queipo de Llano and the International Brigades of the Spanish Civil War, Millán Astray and the Foreign Legion, and the multitude of exiles, émigrés and draft evaders caused by the Portuguese Colonial War, a problem that was very much present when Batarda was starting his career as a painter and exerted relevant influence in 138

the course of the lives of many artists, either because they were conscientious objectors or simply refused to fight in wars that served such obsolete ideologies as the one ruling Portugal at the time.

This list of references is, I am afraid, rather superficial. Each one of them evokes many others, present in the paintings themselves or found in the various notes Batarda, over the years, has written for several of his pictorial series, or in the products of the interpretative ingenuity of all those who have thought about and commented on these works. The average citizen will be quite unfamiliar with a substantial part of these references, and I will refrain from explaining who was Queipo de Llano or what happened in Marracuene in 1885, confident that my ideal reader will easily find such bits of information with their personal smartphone. This makes me realise that these paintings from the 1970s have a tendency to hypertextuality that makes them quite appropriate to today’s eyes, which are quite familiar with the dispersion of attention, with the more or less random exploration of massive quantities of information, with the intuitive association of the most disparate entities and with a relative indifference for the logic of the more conventional narratives. And that makes me feel somewhat more comfortable about this possibly failed attempt to achieve a linear understanding of these paintings, and leaves me more at ease to move around them freely, almost like dancing. Even if dancing may seem like a frivolous, not to say careless activity, when confronted with the seriousness of the matters explored by Batarda’s paintings, a seriousness that remains intact in spite, or because, of their overall mocking tone, which borders on sarcasm.

I try one final approach: a critical exegesis of Batarda’s paintings. I use that big word on purpose, because I wish to invoke the tradition, which dates back to the first interpretations (and smoothing-over of inconsistencies) of biblical texts, with the aim of making clear their original meanings, intended by their writers and discernible by their earliest readers. There is a well-known direct connection between exegesis, hermeneutics as a branch of knowledge that studies the process of interpretation and the development of modern literary criticism and, by extension, of artistic objects. I tilt back to the books of 139

Batarda’s paintings. I open them on the pages that feature essays. In each of them, I start mapping out all their interpretative content. I read that these paintings are conceptual approaches to the concept of art, to the tradition of painting, to the act of painting and the status of the artist, while insisting, against the tide, on narrative, figuration and linguistic games based on allegory, parody, appropriation and irony, as well as on meta-representations that presage post-modernism, at the time still a matter for philosophers, which had yet to extend itself to all spheres of life. That, out of the ruins of all pictorial traditions, Batarda salvages the unsalvageable, a rigorous, outmoded virtuosity applied to watercolour, the technique that is a repository for all the prejudices of highbrow culture, which, by the way, the artist playfully corrupts with all sorts of semantic distortions drawn from mass culture, from comic books to films and pop music. That this period in his work is shot through with sharp political and ideological criticisms of the narrow-minded morals and customs ruling Portuguese culture, politics and sexuality, and also by a fierce attack on the repressive Estado Novo regime and the militaristic imperialism of the Colonial War. Or that his work cultivates a complex relationship between words and images.

A large number of words and textual fragments appear in the paintings, such as interjections and isolated words floating in the space, idioms or short sentences visually organised to act as book titles or advertising slogans, texts on labels and stationery, or as the titles of the pictures themselves, with attached commentaries; each of these elements obeys a peculiar semiotics and must engage with the other visual elements in the painting. Words and texts add layers of meaning to the images, there can be visual and/or verbal puns, double meanings emerge everywhere, and there is a constant polyphonic permutation of signs and codes. The relationship between writing and pictures is so intricate in Batarda’s work that it is also necessary to consider the many texts he has written and published over the years, not so much what amounts to some of the most perceptive art criticism ever written in Portugal, published between 1974 and 1975 in the Sempre Fixe newspaper, but especially the introductory texts for his pictorial series, which can be found in the cata140

logues of his solo exhibitions. These texts offer a great deal of information, from technical details concerning the texture of the paper or the fluidity of the paint to explanations concerning the influences, references and narrative or plastic aims of a particular piece.

While reading some of these texts I quickly realise that, instead of clarifying the paintings, this excess of information complicates them even more, bringing in new factors to assess and discuss. Perhaps this excess of data is meant to preserve the eye from the immediate sensorial perception contained in the brisk dynamics of colours and forms that characterises every painting from this period, forcing it instead to intellectualise what it sees, to create discourse, in the same way that the countless figurations contained in each painting induce the viewer to find in them a narrative, no matter how fragmentary it might be. Concerning his paintings from the 1980s and 1990s, Batarda once wrote that “the more I paint, the less I show�. This, in fact, also applies to the excess of things depicted in his paintings of the 1970s, even if they are all fully in sight there. Analogously, I would add that the more Batarda writes, the less he explains, for his texts also display that constant revelation and occultation of elements that characterises his painting. Accumulation, superimposition, insertion and collision are some of the movements his words, like his figures, perform in the imagination of the reader, while also evoking horror vacui and mise en abyme, two visual devices that are recurrently evoked when his pictures are being discussed.

The tone of his texts, incidentally, helps us understand a little more about his paintings, the inflections and nuances that make up, in words and in images, a very personal style, filled with highly sophisticated satire, derision and, in the texts, disconcerting self-commiseration. Since there are generally no clues as to what is fiction and what is reality in his discourse, it is impossible to know whether Batarda is being earnest in his writings or making use of a persona created to sow doubt in the reader’s mind concerning what his paintings are or intend to be, as they are systematically deconstructed under the guise of a laborious visual and semantic construction. Between critical irony and such a lucid view of things that it threatens to destroy all the con141

victions that sustain the illusion of normality the world needs to go on living from day to day, Batarda’s paintings leave no stone unturned. And yet there they are, reminding us that if we do not destroy everything, we will never be able to start that operation of re-signification that permanently updates the meaning of everything.

142

Eduardo Batarda, João Mourão, Luís Silva We have a prospective title for the exhibition and we’d like to see what you think.

Its starting-point is the title of one of your works, which will be on display, but we believe it makes a lot of sense for the whole body of works the exhibition will showcase.

Great moments in Self-Expression. Eduardo Batarda e os Anos Setenta [Eduardo Batarda and the 1970s] Then, regarding the catalogue, we think that it would be very interesting to include, besides the text by Catarina Rosendo, a conversation between us. A dialogue about the exhibited works that eventually becomes a more performative text. It is an approach we employ often, and we think it’s quite productive, in the sense that it sets the artist’s voice at the centre of the discourse about his work and de-hierarchises the voice of the curators as warranters of the narrative on the artist’s work.

If you’re feeling in good condition and have the time, we could have an e-mail back-and-forth and see where the conversation leads us.

I have a problem with the title you propose: obviously, Great Moments in Self-Expression is an ironic title — and a parody — that works through absurdity, “describing” what is seen as something it manifestly is not. Of course, it’s out of the question to think that it is about “great moments” and much less that there is “self-expression” there.

I think that this absurdity, if you wish to preserve the reference, could be better conveyed in translated form. Grandes Momentos [Great Moments] (just this) conveys better, in my opinion, that absurdity and parody. As for the second half of the title, perhaps Eduardo Batarda nos Anos Setenta [Eduardo Batarda in the 1970s] would be more appropriate; do you think it could be like: Grandes Momentos: Eduardo Batarda nos Anos Setenta?

143

Perhaps it’s obvious that my mind is not working as it should, but I suppose we should start that e-mail back-and-forth. Was this the start?

Yes, it makes a lot of sense to start our electronic back-and-forth by discussing the exhibition’s title. What interested us in the title was precisely what you mention: the irony and absurdity of both the notion of great moments (or masterpieces) and the concept of self-expression. Another possible title that once crossed our minds was L’Adulte terrible: Eduardo Batarda e os Anos Setenta. But it seemed to us to put too much emphasis on the person, instead of focusing on the work. Your editing suggestion for the title is great and we really like Grandes Momentos: Eduardo Batarda nos Anos Setenta, but what is your reaction to the wording of that other hypothetical title? Could it be that you, in the 1970s, were not an enfant terrible, but rather an adulte terrible?

In short: I’ll be 77 years old soon, and I’m not sure if I’ve already reached adulthood. The “hypothetical title” was a bit inappropriate. Of course I enjoyed myself.

In the meantime, I’ve been thinking, and I’m beginning to suspect that the title in English was not as strange as all that, actually. Great Moments.

Eduardo Batarda nos Anos Setenta.

We’ll then retain the title in English and the subtitle in Portuguese. About your first anthological exhibition, which was held at the CAMJAP in 1998, you wrote that “the exhibition must certainly be bad, or very bad, because efforts have been made to add some of my good pieces to it”. What are your expectations concerning this new exhibition? Just as bad, or worse?

My exhibition at what was then the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation’s CAMJAP was actually a retrospective; it’s hard to call something so extensive “anthological”. What I wrote in the catalogue’s introduction must be seen from various angles: 144

Firstly, it was an oblique reiteration of that maxim according to which an exhibition is not bad or good just because it shows things that are bad or good.

Secondly, it was a twisted reference to a belief, which was then current among the addetti ai lavori, according to which my works would always be assuredly bad — but with each new phase being a pretext and an occasion to fondly remember the previous. (A belief that has proved long-lasting.)

Thirdly, it was a memento of an accusation that has been directed at me since c. 1975: that I was a reactionary voice, unable to adapt or convert myself to the current state of the arts —, an adept of anachronic practices and of techniques that manage to be outmoded and elitist at once.

And, finally (and much more importantly), it was a straightforward message for someone connected with the organisation of the exhibition, and was meant to obliquely state that no selection whatsoever had been made between good, bad or so-so pieces.

In fact, during our first week of work, the CAMJAP’s executive secretary wrote to the gallery that represented me in 1998 (since 1971), asking the names and addresses of all (my) collectors they knew about. The gallery sent a list, which had gaps (certainly due to the fact that many of them preferred to pick up the pictures in person), but was still very long.

The secretariat immediately wrote to all the names and addresses on the list, asking the “collectors” if they would be willing to lend their pieces for the exhibition. In the meantime, I supplied the names and contacts of a number of friends who had got some of my works during the 1960s.

The response of the pieces’ owners was quick and overwhelming; quite soon, we knew that scores and scores and more scores of paintings would be available.

A while later, with no choice or selection having been made, the aforementioned executive secretariat wrote to the collectors, announcing that the fateful van, or truck, would soon be coming over. A few weeks later, the truck did its rounds, loaded up the pieces, and took them to the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation.

145

From then on, choice or no choice, it was impossible to refuse or not display any of the received pieces. The percentage of “large” formats was high (possibly due to what I said about the people who came in person to the gallery to pick up their purchases; this naturally happened more often when the pieces were small).

In the meantime, five or six or seven of my works from the 1970s, which were supposed to have gone missing or been destroyed around 1977, were found in the CAMJAP’s vaults.

With all this, the CAMJAP hardly had space to show all the gathered material. The exhibition’s designer spent nightmarish (and sleepless) weeks conceiving a labyrinth that could hold all that stuff. The spaces between paintings had to be reduced to a minimum, especially in the sections dedicated to the 1960s and 1970s.

Some of the series from the 1980s and early 1990s were over-represented, and their respective sections appeared redundant, sometimes repetitive. The disaster was inevitable, and during the last weeks of preparation a virus affected the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation’s computers, causing a tremendous crisis and irreparable damage to the catalogue.

I was referring to all this in the aforesaid catalogue, with no intention to complain or incriminate. I have no idea if that sentence was ever read by the person for whom it was intended. Perhaps not, because we continued to get along very well for years and years.

The reasons for that inaction shouldn’t be simply attributed to some sort of inertness or inability. I think they had to do with the feeling that, because the milieu disapproved of my work, a person in charge could not appear to have a special connection to a low-quality artist. So, it was important to keep a certain distance. An immoderate or proactive commitment could be misconstrued.

This being said, and regarding the second part of your question, I believe there can be no doubt: my hopes are high.

As the space (the rooms) is not ideal, I preferred to have the exhibition focus on a single period/phase with smaller pieces, which in turn demand a 146

close and lengthy viewing. Your choice, which takes into consideration the circumstances and contingents of each room, allows us to hope that the affair will unfold without any pushing and showing, and other things that are quite undesirable in COVID-19 times.

On the other hand, there is the fact that this selection was made by people from a generation that has no special connection to the prejudices of 1975.

With the passing of time, it became widely known that various forms and manifestations of the visual arts of that period coexisted without clashes or conflicts with neo-conceptualisms and neo-minimalisms: all this allows us to think that minds are breathing somewhat more freely now. And we may suppose that there is a greater openness regarding the range of modalities, techniques and approaches that the visual arts can take on.

There is also the hypothesis that my things from the 1970s have been going through a cycle, from which they have now emerged with a certain freshness.

There is another reason for my confidence: the last time I saw a large number of these works (in Serralves, 2011-12), they still preserved their original qualities — the ones my choice of materials had allowed. This was also (or even) valid for the pieces that, being owned by private collectors who had no great capacity or desire to alternate their pictures, had kept them on their walls all the time: these are works on paper, and we know that should not have happened. Yet they appear to be still in excellent condition.

It is quite curious, not to say terribly strange, to think of your work from the 1970s as something that, as you remark, was met with disapproval by the milieu, by your peers and the artistic community of the time. On the one hand, such notions as anachrony or synchrony have lost all evaluative or critical value in our eyes. What value or meaning is there in describing a work from 1974, or 2020, as anachronic? Or, conversely, what does it mean to classify it as synchronic or contemporary? On the other hand, it seems to us that the works from the 1970s have a clearly antagonistic stance, of rupture with both the artistic forms and discourses that were seen as relevant at the time and the social and political dynamics that then defined Portugal. With that in mind, their categorisation as reactionary 147

strikes us as incomprehensible. Since we don’t feel that we are alone in thinking like this, what do you think has changed in the understanding of this moment in your work, or of your work in general?

Both the characterisation and the choice of terms were mine, and it is possible that I have heard the term “reactionary” less often than I implied.

I’d like to make it clear that this “reactionary” was of an essentially artistic nature — the word was, and occasionally still is, used in that context (because it’s “easier”). By extension, it can take on a different meaning: an artistic “reactionary” ran, and still runs, the risk of being seen as reactionary in relation to the “social and political dynamics” of each time.

But as for such terms as anachronism, being out of step, not being “in”, I have heard and read them quite often, over all these past years. I was even accused of being a “School of Paris” artist, in the early 1990s, which, when we think about the museum that now hosts our project, is somewhat ironic (is it?).

In 2016, Julião Sarmento curated an anthological exhibition of my work (White Pavilion, Museu da Cidade, Lisbon), with the stated aim (in his own words) of helping to undo the “bad artist” image that has been attached to me.

I felt a little bit sulky, since no-one likes to hear such truths, but I gratefully did my part in Mise en Abyme.

Met with indifference, the exhibition did little to undo the critical consensus. By the way, Sarmento did not show any “watercolours” from the 1970s, and told me that was because they were, according to him, my “better known” works; I don’t know if by that he meant to say that these would be the least advisable for me to display as an attempt to improve my reputation.

If we accept that he was dealing with a reputation that was deeply rooted and current in the milieu, we may believe that it stems from an oral tradition that relies strongly on such concepts as “avant-garde” and contemporaneity, as well as on criteria that, according to the same tradition, I did not fulfil. (I believe it was in 2005 that a friend who had criticised me harshly around 1992-93, accusing me of a return to the past — “School of Paris”? —, left for me in the gallery, after visiting an exhibition of mine, a nice note, which 148

said only “your works are ‘current’”, I believe he even used these inverted commas. It was both praise and, so to speak, a promotion.)

If it is true that my works from the 1970s are now better accepted than they were in the 1970s themselves, that is surely due, as I said before, to the passage of time and to some loss of memory regarding certain passionate ways of living those times. It is also due to the secure and widespread establishment of a very wide variety of means of expression, within a present-day context in which certain activities that were until then forbidden (or seen as “passé”) are now part of a vast range of possible choices.

It should be noted that all my “phases” or changes in style have been systematically met with disapproval, to such a point that (I already said this), after two changes, it was already consensual that my pieces from the 1970s “were actually the good ones”.

One of the most powerful attacks was caused by what José Ernesto de Sousa described in 1975 as the “per/fection” of these works (as in “per/fect” 1 ).

The appearance of being “well made” was seen as one of their most damning features, even when there were many other elements that were drawn from “low” cultural forms and rather tacky iconographies (which could actually be seen as acceptable). Something that not everybody in Portugal saw clearly at the time eventually became tacitly understood — that these things “were — and are — not to be taken seriously”.

You speak of the attacks as being overwhelmingly caused by formal issues, by your non-alignment with the ways of making that were validated by your peers and by the context of the time. But, beyond surface, form and technique, there was also a whole critical discourse that appears to us nowadays as quite explicit, not to say inflammatory (and when we say we will not say it, we are already saying it). How did these people, “the critical mass”, react to what you were saying about Portugal, its politics and uses? Besides that, the decade was cut in half by the Carnation Revolution. Did the arrival of freedom of expression change in any way the perception of your work?

1

“Fect” comes from the Latin word “fectus”, meaning “done” or “made” (translator’s note).

149

My work of the 1970s started in London, while I was studying at the Royal College of Art, which I entered in 1971, right after military service. I had been incorporated into the army in 1968. Naturally, I worked very little between 1968 and 1971. I did Peregrino Blindado and little else. What I was doing at the Royal College could not be exhibited, by definition, essentially because of the fact that the Gulbenkian Foundation, from which I held a grant, did not allow me to do that.

It was only in July/August 1975 that I had my exhibition as a grantholder (at the Gulbenkian Foundation); I allowed myself to add to the London pieces a few that I had made in Lisbon from late 1974 up to late April 1975.

Until that exhibition, none of my work since May 1968 had been seen in Portugal. By then, obviously, we were already some fifteen months into the Revolution, which, with all its internal conflicts — as it was said at the time —, was already deeply rooted in critical thinking.

If I understand well your question, I can only reply that the “quite explicit (…) not to say inflammatory” critical discourse you mention does not appear to have been very noticeable. Of course, those members of the general public who visited the exhibition were amused by it, apart from some who took exception to the “dirty stuff”. All explicit criticisms, at least those in print, were directed to my, let us say, presumable aesthetic affiliation, and to those formal features that were associated with the so-called olden days. Besides this, there was also the fact that, because I had been absent since 1968, some in the socalled artistic milieu already saw me as a figure from the past.

Tell us a little about the genesis of this body of work. Even though there are significant differences between the pieces you created at the start of the decade (1970-71), the large corpus people usually identify as your 1970s work (1972-75), and the works from the end of the decade, already in transition to something quite different (1978-80), there is a set of references and formal decisions that makes up a continuum that runs throughout this period. What was the influence of your stay in London on the work you carried out afterwards?

150

Here’s what I can remember: In the years 1965-68, I had made some pieces, among them the first ones in which the space was broken and fragmented, with images largely contained in separate rectangles, with often contrasting scales and languages (“high” and “low” references), out-of-synch figurations (figures, simulations, outlines, diagrams, parodies, abstractions), and other more or less striking disjunctions (narrative/pseudo-narrative/non-narrative; sense/nonsense/countersense). (They would also be the first I did with tubes of acrylic paint purchased in Portugal.)

The figurations were done in a somewhat “caricatural” and comic style, a style that I, between Christmas 1968 and 1969-70 (while in the army, when I had no time for paintings) applied in a simplified version to a number of illustrations, done to fulfil commissions from some unconventional publishers, who were frowned upon by the regime and its censors: Fernando Ribeiro de Mello (Afrodite) and António Manso Pinheiro (Estampa). In these illustrations, a Rotring pen and Indian ink were the materials almost constantly used to cover preparatory pencil drawings.

After mid-1969, I had a little more free time, and, since I had little working space at the time, I started using that medium — Indian ink — in combination with watercolour paint squeezed from tubes, diluted into washes and applied on areas usually defined by inked outlines. From this, I got a certain number of coloured pages, to which, in the wake of a misunderstanding with a potential publisher, were added another twenty-four pages in black and white, which explored a vocabulary much closer to the one of comic books, including speech bubbles. The ultimate result of that was O Peregrino Blindado, a “book” that would be printed and published in 1971 by Galeria 111 as an artist’s (?) book, together with three etchings.

The “book” had a complicated history: I was going to return from London in 1974, after the Revolution, and the gallery intended to launch Peregrino… in my first exhibition after returning to Portugal. The thing became inopportune, and soon unfeasible, due to well-known historical reasons. In the full-page pictures, I had explored watercolours and mastered a technical ap151

proach that perfectly fitted my intentions, allowing me to preserve many disjunctions from the previous formulas.

When I came to London, I tried to re-adapt myself to my pre-1968 techniques (canvases, boards, acrylic paints), but that quickly proved a deadend, largely due to scale-related issues. The natural destination of those attempts was a series of works, made from late 1971 to early 1972 — the socalled “line abstracts”. There weren’t many of them; my last “(neo-)figurative” acrylic was made before them and inspired their creation: Retrato de Patrick Caulfield…, which is featured in this exhibition. These “abstract” pieces were not greatly appreciated by my teachers at the Royal College of Art (we agreed that everything they said had already been said, by Roy Lichtenstein, among others; and I was quite aware of how conceptually and technically easy they were to “produce”). Some of my schoolmates liked those pieces, and the very facility of that succès d’estime further convinced me: indeed, all that had already been said.

I began, thanks to my gradual discovery (and study) of English watercolour papers, experimenting again with graphic and visual approaches that had their not very remote source in Peregrino Blindado. At first I did that by night, alone in my room; actually, I began “experimenting” with watercolours while I was still doing my “line abstracts”, which were eventually abandoned altogether.

(Interestingly, I would only exhibit them for the first time in 2009, in Lisbon.

The fact that some people welcomed them enthusiastically, thinking them to be “new works”, says a lot about our art scene.)

Around February 1972, I was working exclusively on my watercolours, which frankly interested me much more. As was the case with Peregrino…, they combined the spirit of illustration and narrative with some technical elements of illustration. Everything was becoming more complicated, since I was increasingly taking my work “out” of painting — and, most importantly, out of art itself. Quite a few would later add to this my “quality of execution”, and put two and two together.

Most of my “influences” had come with me from Lisbon, and included classics from comics and cartoons. There was also my own past, close to Pop 152

art, to Crumb’s recent Fritz The Cat and to some other “underground comix” from the late 1960s. And certainly all art, plus all “contemporary” art, all politics, all literature, all history — at least, all that were within the reach of my extremely modest abilities.

And, of course, the “influences” kept growing, as I attended classes in which I learned something (in some others, perhaps not much), as I read what I could, school-related or otherwise, or as I visited museums and art exhibitions, or yet as I travelled around a bit. The Royal College of Art had a very fine library, and its students could attend some classes and conferences at the Courtauld Institute and visit the print rooms of certain museums. The College itself had an active gallery, with a good programmer. It was there that I saw for the first time (apart from pictures in magazines) an exhibition of arte povera, as well as a Giulio Paolini solo show, for instance. I made as much good use of all that as I could; I had some nice teachers, some good ones, some that were both good and nice, tutors that showed tolerance and perhaps something more. In the General Studies department, I had the chance to select useful subjects, and there were also good tutors there. (They showed more interest in my work than many Painting teachers did.) There were interesting classes, many of them with nothing especially new, but some were important. There were artists who came to visit, and there were also pubs, cinemas and libraries. There were the museums in London and major temporary exhibitions that were, as we said at the time, unmissable. I got along with other Portuguese there, including some of the better-known “London Portuguese artists”.

By the end of the decade, your work appears to switch gears and start moving in a new direction. Did that new path lead you towards what you would be doing in the 1980s, or do you think that the notion of constant rupture between discursive and formal units in your work is more adequate?

I returned from London in August 1974, and it was only in October that I found a place to work. Alongside my job in “art journalism”, I managed to work at a good pace until late April 1975. Then, I found myself again 153

without a workplace and still at the aforementioned job, while having to prepare my Grant-Holder exhibition, which was held at the Gulbenkian Foundation in August.

After months without work, by the end of the year I became an unwary candidate for a teaching position at the Porto Fine Arts School. I ended up there in March/April 1976, still with no fixed abode. The experience was interesting, but not very positive — the after-effects of the Revolution weighed heavily on an institution that was ill-prepared for them and quite divided. My personal situation remained unchanged until late 1977.

In early 1978, we finally found a house where I could work, and I set myself to it ferociously. I returned to my papers, Indian ink and watercolour tubes. Work became obsessive — I was trying to make the most of my free time, which wasn’t much —, intense, and began undergoing changes.

It should be noted that all improvisation in these pieces occurred during the pencil-work stage: there, I could erase and repeat as many times as necessary, because those fantastic English papers could take it all. Once the drawing and the composition had been fixed, the whole was inked. Because the watercolours were transparent (some of them allowed for a limited number of washes), nothing much could be done, in terms of corrections or deletions, as concerned the painted work itself.

As time went on, the work became more and more meticulous, with a tendency to larger scales that contrasted with the profusion of details and textures, as well as with the virtuosity of my technical approach. It also grew more “abstract”. This evolution was short-lived — 1978 and most of 1979. I did some things in larger formats, Alexanderplatz being the largest of them all — and possibly the masterpiece of its kind and of that period. (It’s in a collection in Porto, and its owner adamantly refuses to loan it, so much so that, in Serralves (2011-12), it was represented as a painted rectangular space on the wall and a reproduction on the catalogue.) I began worrying about showy virtuosity and with what I felt to be a degree of repetitiveness.

At the end of the decade, I made a decision: something that, it seemed to me, would change everything (but perhaps not quite). I decided to abandon 154

paper and watercolours, go back to acrylics and larger canvases, and replace the improvisation in drawing with an entirely improvised painting, in which every new brushstroke could obliterate everything beneath it. No drawing, no preparatory outlines, and a colour range that was more limited, more muted, and also darker. It was a desired change, one that would usher in a new manner, which in turn would over the following years undergo an evolution marked by striking changes. Or, as some said, “always the same old thing”.

Tell us a little about the connection between the works and their titles. The pieces from the beginning of the decade, which were made a little after your arrival at the Royal College of Art and which you have abandoned, were identified by an “Untitled” that is quite unusual in your practice. After that, the relationship between the works and their appellation changes drastically, sometimes reaching extraordinary levels of delirium and absurdity, as in the case of Primeiro concurso mundial de acordeão cubista para marinheiros hemorróicos (categoria costas) [First world contest of cubist accordion for sailors with haemorrhoids (back category)], for instance. How does this dialectic between the object and its name operate?

You have chosen an interesting example, because: 1 — First — “I’m the first”, “I’m the greatest”, etc.; 2 — World — this competition is global and I am the best in the world, etc.; and you have there, or see there, a sort of podium, a sort of stage, basically a “scenic prop” for the competition; 3 — Contest — art, the arts are a contest, a constant competition, etc.; 4 — of Cubist Accordion (or is it a bandoneon?) — can you find a more cubo-futurist, or more “cubist”, instrument than the accordion, so sadly neglected by the modernists in their still-lifes; the accordion is the piano du pauvre; 5 — for Sailors — now we see a figure-silhouette of a sailor, remotely related to Popeye, with his pants down or missing (Donald Duck); 6 — with Haemorrhoids — we also see, quite at the centre, a sort of cluster, virtuously painted in watercolour reds covered in various carmine washes: that cluster wonderfully conveys the malady in question; 7 — (Back Category) — the sailor (?) turns his back to us, while playing his 155

instrument behind his back and displaying the fruits of his sorrow: to do something with one’s eyes closed, without using one’s hands or behind one’s back is a well-known (and, at this moment, incomplete) idiom we employ to boast of our skill or competence. In this example, the thing — the title — could not be more explanatory and down-to-earth: it faithfully describes and tells what is “represented”.

This means that the mental process that led to the title is literally the same mental process that organised the composition.

This happens often, except when it happens in a different way: (Com as) fardas em farrapos [(With Our) Ragged Uniforms] “illustrates” the, or a, “war of the arts”, with the conflicting forces divided into four main fields; as a replacement for what would be a more literal title, a fragment (a rag) from the lyrics of Fado das Trincheiras has been used.

Sometimes, there are plays on words: La Peinture qui coule means both The Dripping Paint or The Sinking Painting.

At other times, the thing is more subtle: Where the Work Stops (Cahora Bassa) means what it means, i.e. what is depicted in the painting — a dam (apparently, “cahora bassa”, the place where the famous Mozambican dam was built, meant “place where the work stops”, because, being a waterfall, it was useless to row). However, the picture is also full of autobiographical or pseudoautobiographical vignettes, and maybe it all means “here my work stops”, or “I have nothing more to say”, or “this means nothing” (?).

In Salade aux artistes-peintres, the process is again a literal one: a salad, with watercress, hard-boiled eggs, olives, etc., as well as a certain number of mostly imaginary “portraits” of beret-wearing painters.

Albuquerque Arabesque is a “stylistic” painting (the full title includes the words “I Wanna Style”, which was precisely my intention), filled with motifs alluding to New Mexico and the southern border’s cultural intermixing; this picture plays with the seeming incongruence in that city name — which is also the name of an explorer, a conquistador, a viceroy, an imperial brand from Spain, and has obvious Arabic roots — that has been imposed on some many varied native peoples; and it also plays with the “arabesques”, 156

drawn here as rodeo lassos and knots. Furthermore, this watercolour also indirectly evokes Native American folk art and another famous New Mexican city, the “artists’ colony” of Santa Fe. It was an oblique commentary (?) on those styles that develop outside major centres, even though I was in a “major centre” then.

L’Illustration (Manolito) prosaically evokes the atrocities of the Spanish Civil War and the adventures of Tintin, while making use of the title of an old, quite old, French news magazine — and inventing a name for a young, folksy leading character. Besides, my name is Eduardo Manuel.

This conversation has been going on for quite a long time, and so we would like to bring it to a close with a somewhat personal question. How do you think these works have stood the test of time? We have already discussed how they went, in some manner, from being proscribed by your peers of the time to, we think, a status of historical ineluctability. How do you feel, when you see them gathered as a coherent, articulate and chronological whole in 2020? Fifty years have passed since the works that open the exhibition were made. The world has changed, and so have you. How do you feel, when looking back (and consequently forward) as you do now?

Firstly, I must comment on two of your assumptions. While, on the one hand, it can be said that the “proscription” of my work was not as serious or intense as all that, it seems to me, on the other, that what you call its (current?) “historical ineluctability” is greatly exaggerated. We’ll not insist on this, but that is what I think.

Secondly, and back to the first part of your question, as to the “test of time”: what happens in terms of the physical conservation of the works? Considering that these watercolours are on paper and many of them are constantly on their collectors’ walls, their condition is excellent. It has to do with the quality and excellence of the materials and the correctness of the techniques.

As to what my things now may mean or stand for, within a present context in which many will believe that computers were used to make them, etc., 157

they represent the current state of a process that involves decades of equivocations. I made these things by trying to essentially say that it is impossible to “say things” in art, or that art is not what will change the world. I made them (and I’m thinking back to my beginnings as a painter, back in the mid-1960s) when the prime targets of my derision were, on the one hand, neorealism and all the “social realisms”, and, on the other, the so-called “lyrical abstraction” and the “School of Paris”. Just see where all that has led.

My “good” quality of execution fooled many people, who saw my “watercolours” as hailing from “olden days”. (Around 1988, a radio station broadcasted a dinner-interview on the present situation of the visual arts, featuring two guests: Pedro Cabrita Reis, who was there as a representative of what was “current” then, and myself. Over the first questions, I quickly realised that I was expected to stand for “neorealism”. Honestly.) Of course, these equivocations were largely the result of defective information. This when, since around 1975, people believed that I did what I did because I didn’t know what was going on — because I was poorly informed, poor me. Which, modestly speaking, was not the case.

That is why I now see my things from the 1970s, which some call “PostPop”, as a general memory, connected to a time in my life from which many of them are distant, and which have over time incorporated layers and layers of the aforementioned equivocations, including some of my own. I see or remember pieces that were naive, conceited, smug. Smug with a sophistication I didn’t possess. Over time, I see pieces that become more perfect, more achieved, more complex, and, why not, more cultured. I see traps and deep holes into which viewers couldn’t help but fall. I remember the hours upon hours I devoted to drawing, repeating and erasing until it was just right. I remember a technical study of watercolour that, in its own way, was marked by virtuosity, even though it was miming the (simple) colouring processes of cartoons or comic books. I remember that, when they were exhibited in 1975, 1982, 1998 and 2011, they enjoyed a certain popular success, to the great embarrassment of scholars and critics. It should be noted that the method behind them was as literary as it was visual.

158

Some of the pieces, including items that are not featured in this exhibition, are paintings I revisit with pleasure, and with the satisfaction a “good work” brings.

I hope that these pictures, which I have never rejected, may provide amusement to people. If you have the patience, look at them leisurely. Decipher their nonsensical bits, their dumb puns, their references to many different visual languages. Don’t call them “excessive”. Don’t speak of “delirium”.

Don’t exaggerate.

159

Eduardo Batarda_Great Moments.qxp:documenta 28/09/20 14:41 Page 1