Pintomeira
Artist
Pintomeira was born in Deocriste, Viana do Castelo–Portugal, in 1946.  He enters, in 1957,  the Seminary School which he abandons in 1961, after considering that he had no vocation to the priesthood.
In 1965 he finishes his high school  and  decides to leave behind his studies in the Faculdade de Belas Artes (nowadays, Faculdade de Arquitetura) to get an Arquitecture degree and chooses to begin an artistic career, in the Visual Arts.

Between 1967 and 1972 he is in Lisbon. He frequents a collective Studio in the Mouraria District, where he meets the surrealist painter Raul Perez. During that period of time he holds some exhibitions and gets acquainted with the  older artists Mario Cesariny, Cruzeiro Seixas, the writer Luis Pacheco and others belonging to the Portuguese surrealist movement.

In 1972, after a short stay in Africa, he leaves to Paris in the company of the Dutch painter  Marijke de Hartog, who he met in Portugal. The two decide to move, later on, to Amsterdam-Netherlands, where they get married in 1976. In the Duch capital, Pintomeira opens his Studio to keep on working on the late surrealism that he started in Lisbon, some years before,   influenced by his older  fellow artists.

Between 1977-1980,  he attends the CREA | Cultureel Studentencentrum van de Universiteit van Amsterdam), where he studies Visual Arts (Painting) after having failed the possibility of admission to the Nederlandse Filmacademie (Dutch Film Academy), his first goal.

In 1978, after a few exhibitions in the Netherlands, he holds his first show in Paris, at the Galerie Entremonde. In that same year, he participates in the Salon Metamorphoses rendering homage to the Belgian surrealist painter René Magritte, held at the Grand Palais des Beaux Arts in Paris. With this participation, he decides to put an end to his surrealist period. About this surrealist journey (1967-1978), Luis Chaves, an art historian, writes in the catalogue of a retrospective exhibition, held in 2005, at the Municipal Museum of Viana do Castelo: "We fall back until the seventies of the XX century to get in contact with his passage through the Surrealism. He meets Mario Cesariny, Cruzeiro Seixas, Raul Perez and others linked to this movement, during his stay in Lisbon (1967-1972). However, it will be in Paris and later in Amsterdam, that all the conventions and barriers come apart to make way for an expression free of all rational and moral concerns, resulting from the idea introduced by André Breton: the pure psychic automatism." (1)

During the decade of the 1980s, in his studio in Amsterdam, Pintomeira receives various influences, the most important coming from the group CoBrA (aggregation of initial letters of the cities of Copenhagen, Brussels and Amsterdam) in which are included great names such as Karel Appel, Corneille, Asger Jorn, Lucebert and Pierre Alechinsky. Some influences of that movement, such as the thick textures, the automatic drawing, the bright and primary colors in complementary combinations, and yet the simple motifs, the links to surrealism and primitive art, accompanied the artist in the years to come. (2 . 3)

In the decade of the 1990s,  he starts the series named Contours: an innovation that consists in a stylization and depuration of the figure, which results in a constant   exercise and experimentation around the contour (outline), making it predominant through its enlargement, extension and multiplication. Donald Meyer, writer and art critic, writes in the book “Contours . Contornos” edited by Appelbloesem Pers from  Amsterdam-Holland: "The brush stroke is deeply personal and invites the viewer to go through all those outlines giving him the possibility to admire the picture or object in the comfort of the amphitheatre suburbs. The precision, almost mathematical, of all those lines and contours, accentuates a concern in seeking for harmony that smooths a more rational or dramatic observation of the memory. However, this precision in searching for balance does not mean austerity or imprisonment of the lyrical. ... This linear exuberance, these thick brush strokes that intersect and interconnect, lead to new areas and offer movement and rhythm to a static representation or inspire a sense of dynamism and excitement to a depurated figure". (4)
During the decade of the nineties, Pintomeira presents his work in several solo exhibitions,  participates in various collective ones, and art biennials.

In 1999, Pintomeira leaves Amsterdam and returns his birthplace, Deocriste, in Portugal. The work he produces in his new studio, in the North of the country, iniciates a wide range of figurative artworks, where  the CoBrA group influences are still present. This new series of acrylics, graphite and mixed media on canvas and cardboard  was named: "New Line".  About this work produced between 1999 and 2007, Alberto A. Abreu, a historian, writer and curator, wrote: "The dematerialization of the objects was the way followed by Pintomeira in a New Line where the contour ended up to be reduced to a fillet, the images of the objects appear stylized, being now reduced to silhouettes without color or respect for the other objects of the picture, in a combination of textures which give them rhythm, unreality, statute of "pure forms". In this environment, Pintomeira put square grids, birds, feminine silhouettes, profile faces, fruits; and balconies, and moons, and faces with eyes of wonder". (5)

Between 2003 and 2010, and alternating with "New Line" Pintomeira also produces a vast work on canvas and cardboard, to which he attributed, years later, the name "Faces".

In 2007,  he moves to Braga and in his new studio he makes a turning point in his figurative work. All the CoBra influences and the dense contours disappear. The theme "Interiors" presents works related to the pop art with influences of the graphic design. The figure is clearly present and the interior scenes denounce theatrical representations.  In the catalogue of an exhibition of "Interiors", Moisés de Lemos Martins, sociologist/writer and professor at the University of Minho, wrote: "In Interiors these spaces that articulate the interior with the exterior are, however rare. At this aesthetic point, marked by the Pop Art and by Graphic Design, Pintomeira describes, in general terms, enclosed places within themselves, without escape lines or horizon. This proceeding obeys to the principles of the Minimalist Art. The artist creates some work that lies between painting, sculpture and architecture, by favouring the exhibition space. This space, both continuous and discontinuous, is based on the autonomy of the inner world and does not seem to conceive any exterior. But it is not inconceivable that this landscape may also be perceived from the outside, while the interior is necessarily hidden by a façade." (6)

Between 2009 and 2010, the theme "Other Faces" is produced. These new artworks represent photographs of faces collected from the media or internet researches. These faces go through a big scale digital printing on canvas, being, posteriorly, glued to the main canvas. The following step consists in an intervention with acrylic painting and introducing dense brush strokes, lines, geometrical shapes and streaking. The photography, the graphic design, the advertising and the pop art are, here, very present.
About this series, Moisés de Lemos Martins, again, is the one who writes in the catalogue that accompanied the exhibition entitled "OtherFaces: "In this exhibition, with ten exclusively figurative paintings, the language of the artist unties the reality in a total process of man made pictures, which pass the non-place of impersonality, as if they were objects produced for consumption. In a neutral and documentary style, these portraits are, indeed, the impersonality, but also show the isolation. The critical space,  in the presence of a subject, does not exist in them; There is only the paradoxical space of their disappearance."

In 2011, he works on the theme "Exteriors" that complements "Interiors" produced between 2008 and 2009. It consists of a series of works that bring together figures of everyday life in urban scenarios, crossing street crosswalks, where the road signs are heavily exploited. José Luis Ferreira, sociologist, writer, researcher of art and Academic Member AAI/AIE-International Association for Aesthetics, wrote in the exhibition catalogue "Exteriores. "Interiores" “... the regularity of linear line, expanded to wide, straight or curved track ... the docking of signs, the pictogram, the symbolic and cultural determinant load - the light - in the Global Village, where no one loses the sense of [...] "solid and volatile things" [...] coexistent, inside and outside (in the inside and outside), of all that is beautiful, in the existence of the things, whether natural or artificial... Therefore, I admit that it should be considered, while a strict point of view and only methodological - taxonomic, atavistic, or pragmatic - any essential differentiation between Urban Exteriors and Domestic Interiors, in the painter's pictorial work... "  (7). Also Michael Amy, Professor of History of Art at the Rochester Institute of Thenology, USA and member of the International Association of Art Critics (AICA) writes in the essay  "An Empire of Signs":  "The paintings belonging to the Exteriors series (2011-2012) fascinate me, with their accumulation of signs, their hints of three-dimensional space that is contradicted by other motifs emphasizing the plane, and their juxtaposition of figuration and degrees of abstraction."  ( 8)

In 2013, Pintomeira returns to the Photography. A passage, though brief, by photographic expression, had already been made, in 1979, in Amsterdam. "Somewhere" is, now, the title chosen for the work produced in his studio, with agency models. The choice of a model, in this case female ones, for the central subject of this photographic work, was determined by the fact that, in most of his artworks, the human figure is, also, its main element. Thus, the transition from painting to photography was consequent, producing, in one and other, a figurative work. These photographs have, also, the elements (influences) of graphic arts, design, advertising and pop art, following the line he used in the making of  “Interiors . Exteriors.” (9) His fine art photographs portfolio consists of  different themes: Studio Photography, Exteriors, Composites, Parallel Lines and Complementary Colors. Al these photographs have been exhibit in different shows and are published in book and catalogue.

In 2015, Pintomeira starts the production of a new series entitled "Cutouts". He agglutinated the words from the verb "to cut out" and substantivate the agglutination to the word cutouts. The artist used a distinct mixed media technic, more comprehensive and more elaborated. He paints or draws his shapes, mostly faces, with acrylic or graphite pencil, on a non-assembled canvas. Then, using scissors, he cuts it, randomly, in different pieces. These fragments are, then, ordered on the floor of his studio, until he reached the final composition. All these pieces (canvas), ordered this way, are then glued to the main canvas, now mounted on a wooden grid. In the next phase the glued shapes and the spaces between them are worked with acrylics, using drippings, layers, textures, and lines. The aesthetical composition expresses degradation, destruction, aging, and the vision of a deteriorated mural painting, or ancient frescos ruined by the time or by man’s negligence. In the catalogue edited to accompany various Cutouts exhibits, the Professor of Contemporary History at the University of Santiago de Compostela and President of the Galician Cultural Council, writes: “Pintomeira possesses technical expertise, intellectual training, knowledge of national and international painting’s paths and, beyond that, a strong experimental will. Therefore, we end up to the new proposal of his biography, which is the cut-outs series, inspired by the artwork Henri Matisse developed during the final years of his life and that, was recently exposed in all its magnitude in the prestigious museums of NOMA and Tate Modern. For Matisse, that project had been a crepuscular solution; for Pintomeira it is, on the contrary, a new experience for its artistic trajectory maturity. After wondering into surreal or accommodating figurative art with identity’s necessity, which marked most of his artwork, now is more about understanding the actual world, into which the fragmentary, the recycled, but also the snips being part of present society’s speech, of its fears and challenges.” (10)

In 2016, Pintomeira starts the production of "New Faces". Some photographs produced during the sessions in his Studio for the theme "Somewhere", are now worked with acrylics, pastels, graphite and other materials. This mixed technique produces figurative works (Faces), where photography appears mixed with painting. These two artistic languages, painting and photography, end up cohabiting the same space, interacting and dialoging visually, giving to the spectator an observation of a united whole and to the artist two distinct pathways in a unified conjunct.
Pintomeira photographed and painted, combining the two aesthetical concepts over the same physic area, without conflicts nor dualistic interpretations.

In 2016, during the months of September, October and November, the Municipality of Viana do Castelo shows to the public an Antological Exhibition, celebrating  50 years of the artistic career of Pintomeira. Four different places (Galleries and Museums) exhibit more than hundred artworks in the  language of painting and fine art photography. At the same time, is published, by the same Municipality, a hardcover, 500 pages artbook, displaying great part of his 50 years artistic work. Pintomeira is, also these year,  awarded the medal of cultural merit by the Viana do Castelo Municipal Council for the relevant services provided to the visual arts.

During the years 2017 and 2018, Pintomeira develops the series Faces of the Renaissance Madonnas. While living in Amsterdam, during the 1970 decade and his surrealist period, he was strongly influenced by the themes used by the Renaissance artists, mainly allusive to the Greek Roman mythology and to the Bible. With this new theme, his fourth related to the female face (Faces 2003, Other Faces 2010 and New Faces 2016) he revisits the Renaissance artworks, being, now, influenced by the devout faces of the Madonnas produced during that admirable period of Art History.
The devout and contemplative expression of these artworks remit us to a religious theme produced during the Renaissance, thought, these faces are expressed in a simple drawing and, already, in a mannerist style. They are mixed media technic on canvas, glued on PVC plate. His energetic and impressive style continues present in  these faces drawings, using a strong and dense outline.

Between  2018-2019, Pintomeira creates Moving Figures. Using a very simple concept, the artist obtains, here, a visual and aesthetic expression so much intriguing as fascinating. Female or male black silhouettes, walking and placed on a flat background produces an expectation perception and sometimes a brutal visual effect due to its enormous simplicity.
Moving Figures is the expression of a moment of someone who walks to somewhere. Once the artist does not give us an interpretation of his visage, we are not able to get to know   much about these personages, but we can guess something. Observing gestures, posture, the way they walk and what they carry we are taken to a position
where we can decipher some state of mind or intentions. Some walk with no purpose, with no direction home, others walk with one objective in mind and in an assertive way.
About the painting techniques, Pintomeira used acrylics on canvas, with flat and smooth brush strokes  and a background in vibrant colors or light grey tones.

We are in 2020. Pintomeira present us his 17th theme, Cutouts 2 witch he started, already, at the end of 2019. This time, he leaves his comfort zone (figuration), crosses a bridge, reaches the other bank and surprises us with a totally new aesthetic language. We are now witnessing an unquestionable, even axiomatic change in the form of its artistic expression, as well as an audacious turning in its  plastic and formal concept. The three-dimensional illusion of space is abandoned, and the presence of the human figure, objects and other representations that have accompanied him for almost 50 years (Surrealism 1972-Moving Figures 2019) are set aside. We could, at first glance, think that we are dealing with a composition in the area of the abstractionism, although never understood in its orthodox definition.
It is for us, very clear, that the figuration was, here rejected, but his concern, searching for some identifying elements, place us in an ambiguity which leads us to a hesitation when we think to place these artworks in the abstraction area.
In the technical field, Pintomeira uses tissues of different patterns that are cut into pieces which are ordered and reordered until an aesthetic configuration is achieved. These tissue fragments are, posteriorly, glued to acrylic painted canvas. His usual drippings, lines and dashes continue being used. Its chromatism is not exuberant and, somewhere seems to be an intention to tranquilize a formal composition already very imposing.
Again, the artist surprised us,  now, in a more radical and unpredictable way. However, we continue to assure that his signature is always present and Pintomeira is always there.

In 2021, he returns again to this birthplace, Deocriste, where he opens a new studio  and begins to work on his 18th theme, using collage techniques.

In 1922, he devotes himself to writing. Having, in the previous years, been already busy writing art essays, papers and art criticism, he decides, now, to write a book about a short period of Art History with the title "The Art in the Interwar Period, 1914 . 1918", "A Arte no Período Entreguerras, 1914 . 1918"
Since 1966  to the present days, Pintomeira realized more than one hundred solo exhibitions in Portugal and abroad. Between 1971 and 2020 he participated in several collective exhibitions, biennials and art fairs, in Portugal and in other EU States. He is represented in various private, institutional and state art collections in several EU countries, in the UK, USA, Israel, Canada and Brasil.





Publications
Het Parool | Recensie Cultuur Supplement | Kunst Expositie, Surrealisme, Galerie Jollijst, Februari 1975, Amsterdam, Netherlands
Metamorphoses | Le Salon 1978, Surrealisme | Catalogue Hommage à René Magritte, Grand Palais,
Paris, France, 1978
Le surréel maniériste | M. de Hartog | Catalogue Expo Galerie Entremonde, Paris, France, 1978
Pintomeira | Livro, Amsterdam, Netherlands 1995 | De Appelbloesem Pers publishing | artworks produced between 1972 and 1994
Het Surrealisme van Pintomeira ( Pintorosha), 1978, intervieuw in tijdschrift Rath & Doodeheefver, Amsterdam, Netherlands
Contours 1997 | Donald Meyer, art critic, Amsterdam, Netherlands | Text  Contours ISBN 90 7045 9167
Contours | Contornos | 1998, De Appelbloesem Pers publishing, artbook, Amsterdam, Netherlands,
ISBN 9070459167
Catalogue Pintomeira - Pintura | 1999, Visão Gráfica | Pintoart | Depósito Legal 144276/99
Da Silhueta ao Pintor 2002 | Texto de Alberto Antunes de Abreu, historiador, escritor, ISBN 972-9071-37-3
Pintomeira | Pintura; Catálogo Nova Linha, 2003, depósito legal 205550/04, ISBN 972-9071-37-3
Latitudes | Cahiers Lusophones, | Texto de Egídio Álvaro, crítico de arte, Paris, 2004, ISSN 1285-0756
Catalogue Pintomeira | Pintura, 2006 | retrospectiva 1970-2005 | Textos de Alberto Antunes de Abreu, Donald Meyer, Egídio Álvaro, Arlette Salgado Faria e Luis Chaves,
http://www.worldcat.org/identities/viaf-284531829/
Da manipulação dos objectos à sua desmaterialização 2006 | Texto de Alberto Antunes de Abreu, historiador, escritor | catálogo retrospectiva 1970 | 2005
Catálogo Interiores 2009 | Pintomeira | Pintura, Enter Impressão Lda |
Exposição Interiores Museu D. Diogo de Sousa, Braga
Interiores | entrevista vídeo sobre o tema Interiores 2009 | localvisão | noticias, pintomeira
A erótica dos objectos 2009 | Texto de Moisés de Lemos Martins, Universidade do Minho, Centro de Estudos de Comunicação e Sociedade (CECS), Catálogo Interiores
Outras Faces | Pintura | Pintomeira; 2010, Pintart, Catálogo, depósito legal 311065/10,
ISBN 978-989-20-1997-0
O espaço paradoxal da desaparição do sujeito 2010 | Texto de Moisés de Lemos Martins, Universidade do Minho, Centro de Estudos de Comunicação e Sociedade (CECS), catálogo Outras Faces
ISBN 978-989-20-1997-0
Exteriores | Interiores | Pintomeira; 2011, Pintart, Catálogo, depósito legal 330722/11,
ISBN 978-989-20-2614-5
Exteriores & Interioridades 2011 | Texto de José Luís Ferreira, sociólogo, escritor, investigador de arte | Membro Académico Ind. IAA/AIE –International Association for Aesthetics,| catálogo Exteriores | Interiores ISBN 978-989-20-2614-5
Interiores. Exteriores | FCT Universidade Nova, Lisboa, publicação Design em Lisboa 2011 |
 http://design-em-lisboa.blogspot.com/2011/11/pintoneira.html
ArtWall, International Contemporary Art 2011 Zine, Internet Solutions and Publications,
International Comtemporary Artists; 2012, ICA publishing, New York, USA, ISBN 9786188000728
Prospero International Art Book; 2012, INSAT publishing, copyright 2012 Insat Lda,
ISBN 978-972-97566-6-5
Art Unlimited, MOT publishing, Contemporary Artists. 2014, Londres, UK, ISBN 978-91-89685-28-8
Somewhere | Catálogo Studio Photography | 2014, Pintart, depósito legal 376075/14, ISBN 978-989-20-4820-8
Fotografias como pinturas sobre telas. A declinação da melancolia 2014 | Texto de Moisés de Lemos Martins, Universidade do Minho, Centro de Estudos de Comunicação e Sociedade (CECS) | Catálogo Somewhere
ISBN978-989-20-4820-8
Os Cut-outs como metáfora do nosso tempo 2015 | Ramon Villares, História Contemporânea, Universidade de Santiago de Compostela, Presidente do Conselho da Cultura Galega | Publicado em Catálogo Cutouts
ISBN 978-989-20-6470-3, Março 2016
Cutouts | Pintura, 2016, Pintart, Catálogo, Depósito legal 405846, ISBN 978-989-20-6470-3,
Março 2016
Fragmentos de uma viagem 2016 | Álvaro Laborinho Lúcio, Juiz Conselheiro, escritor, 
Os limiares dos encontros 2016, Marzia Bruno, Curadora | História da arte, Estudos Museológicos e Curadoriais
Pintomeira | Painting | Photography 2016, Livro capa dura, 500 páginas, edição CM Viana do Castelo,
ISBN 978 972 588 255 9
An Empire of Signs 2017 | https://www.rit.edu/spotlights/o-imperio-de-sinais-empire-signs | Essay by Michael Amy Ph.D. | College of Imaging Arts & Sciences, Rochester Institute of Technology, Rochester, USA
7 Fragmentos em A, 2018 | A figura feminina e a quentura das cores | Arlette Salgado Faria,
ISBN 978-972-588-265-8
Autopsying the moribund art blader 2018, essay by Pintomeira
MoMA issue of World of Art Contemporary Art Magazine | Publishing World Of Art (WOA), 2020 | Londres, UK | ISSN: 1404-3408
ISBN: 9789189685451
contact@pintomeira.com
+351966798686


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