Raúl Perez. Drawings and Paintings, 1963-2008

Pause
Raúl Perez. Drawings and Paintings, 1963-2008
Temporary exhibition
Author(s): 
Raúl Perez
16/02/2009
- 12/04/2009
Floor: 
-1
Raúl Perez. Drawings and Paintings, 1963-2008
Temporary exhibition
Author(s): 
Raúl Perez
16/02/2009
- 12/04/2009
Floor: 
-1
Body: 

Raúl Perez, born in Minho, in 1944, held his first exhibition at the age of 28. Associated with the Portuguese surrealist movement, especially with Cruzeiro Seixas, Raúl Perez was able to both fit into this continuity and free himself from it. In 1972, 1982 and 1985, his work was shown at Galeria de São Mamede, Lisbon. He also participated in various exhibitions organized by the writer and painter Mário Cesariny (1923-2006).

Surrealism is obviously a reference structure in the work of Raúl Perez, but the late arrival of Surrealism in Portugal, produced a fleeting expression. A controversial and contested figure, Mário Cesariny believed that 'the lack of structure gave Portuguese Surrealism a huge external vitality'; and he stressed that in Portugal there has never been a surrealist movement, not even in the year of public existence (1948-1949) of the Lisboa Surrealist Group, which, after the publication of four books, a public manifestation and a painting exhibition will extinguish itself, leaving room for another group that will soon disappear. 'Portuguese Surrealism lived and died, without doubt, illegally'.

Raúl Perez is clearly heir to this story, even if he fits above all in the current once celebrated by André Breton, that of “Magic Art”. Dreams turned into semblance and substance, his both strange and perfect works act on the materialisation of the bewitchment.

Secondary text: 

'The painting of Raúl Perez – who, by the way, refuses to be linked to any movement – lies somewhere close to surrealism, while at the same time leaving it behind, as it is rooted in a timeless anthropology of the imagination that reveals a sociological vision of its time. [...] The art of Raúl Perez may have an affinity with these horizons of an enigmatic and poetic fascination marked by the painful consciousness of human limits and aspirations and, more recently, with the exponents of metaphysical painting (De Chirico) and international Surrealism. He reveals the disquieting atmosphere of De Chirico, of a waiting that fails to discern its object, of Delvaux, Magritte, Ernst or Dalí, the sense of the marvellous that brings him closer to an enchanted realm of sensitivity, a vision that does not duplicate the real but is its fantastic mirror. Yet he sets himself apart from all, practically renouncing the most characteristic element of painting, colour. For the world of his art, in black and white, he has chosen a purification of colour that is perhaps a way of insisting on the essential. [...] The bewildering universe of Raúl Perez that today we are invited to decipher is positioned, and positions us, in the shady atmosphere of the dreams of the night and, in the flow of images that feed our imagination, defines a territory, a horizon of darkness, where we decipher the portrait in the immensity of a Western adventure and misfortune.'

Maria João Fernandes [Excerpt from the text Figures of the Sphinx in the Painting of Raúl Perez, published in the exhibition catalogue]