Carlos Botelho - Work

Work

"For Botelho the thirties are a thrilling decade full of extremely dense production", and his painting is formally characterized by a strong connection to expressionism. Within it one can detect three different strands of subject matter:

Firstly, the urban landscape of the city in which he was born and lived. Lisbon soon stands out as the "predominant iconography, even the body of the deepening of the painter’s recourses and of their successive poetics". It is not, however, the almost single path we find in his later work: "landscape is enunciated as a possibility in this recently-started career, but it is not yet the imperative matrix of the future". Botelho will also paint other cities: Paris, Florence, Amsterdam, New Orleans and, above all, New York: "In terms of Portuguese art at the end of the nineteen thirties, these paintings are located at the vanguard of everything that was being done at the time".

Alongside the urban landscapes, and "intending to free himself from the strict appreciation that had consecrated him as a humorist", Botelho turns his attention to the social realm in works that thematically and stylistically bring him close to the "expressionist painting of the Northern European tradition, enunciating a sense of research that could be connoted to Van Gogh’s Dutch period". His acrobats, his blind men and fishermen are solid and dense figures, showing us another facet of his work.

The third path that will occupy him throughout the initial decade is the portrait, which will culminate in the portraits of Beatriz, his parents and his children. And if the portrait of Botelho’s father, from 1937, is "an axial moment in his work", the portraits of his children are the final step in the autonomization of his approach: "No concession to the conventional taste in these two portraits, no sentimentality for the models, but rather a brusqueness of gesture and of attitude, as if his intimate relationship with them in no way affected his desire for painting".

From the nineteen 1930s onwards Botelho’s Lisbon becomes an intensely personal realm, capable of revealing something profound, granting us "the view of an archetypical city whose beauty is the mediating form of the truth of a people or of its specific anthropology . With a great simplicity of processes and effects, created a plastic universe as the symbolic and imaginative mirror of one of the most significant facets of the Portuguese spirit". He records the city, "but, more deeply, he invents it, shifting the accidents and the places, subjecting them to a plastic demand. Yet we deeply acknowledge that this “painted” city is as real, or more real (?), than the existing one".

His painting will subtly change. The softening of the expressionist intensity opens up paths to a different poetic dimension and to a new awareness of the canvas’ flatness. In the 1950s that option becomes radicalized: "Botelho starts out from modernist principles, like the autonomy of the line the rejection of Renaissance perspective”, in “different” works in which he more than ever comes close to abstraction.

The formal principles he investigates in these works will reappear shortly after under a different guise in the formal structuring of the urban landscapes that occupy him until the end: "The last productive clash came with the affirmation of abstractionism in the 1950s, via the Paris school and Vieira da Silva, and this was decisive for the cycles of his long final production: he did not cut off the metaphorical body of Lisbon but disciplined it in rhymes and chromatic spatialities in which light is the determining referent.