Two exhibitions of the work of the plastic artist Manuel Baptista open in Faro, this Thursday, the 9th of October. The first, called “relevos”, opens at 18 pm, at Teatro das Figuras. On the same day, at 00 pm, at Galeria Trem, the Algarve artist will also present the exhibition “drawings”.
The exhibition on display at Teatro das Figuras is constituted by a set of works made with cutouts of fabrics, development of the research that has been carried out in painting and drawing since the sixties.
In this selection, present in the theater foyer, the artist emphasizes the sculptural dimension of his obsessive organic or geometric forms, revealing to us a series of “wall sculptures”, protected by transparent boxes, in which he proposes cut reliefs, perhaps landscapes, for the viewer's imagination fills with meanings.
At Galeria Trem, the spectator has access to the artist's set of drawings that are, according to Mirian Tavares, coordinator of the UAlg Research Center in Arts and Communication (CIAC), characterized “by the idea of deconstruction and recomposition of surfaces”, in a “crossover between the landscape just suggested and a strong ornamental tendency” that invites to know the lines “sometimes robust, sometimes delicate, that fill the blank space with their concerns”.
The programming of this Gallery is managed by the University of Algarve, through CIAC and the degree course in Visual Arts.
Manuel Baptista was born in Faro. In 1957, he left for Lisbon, where he attended the Architecture course at the Lisbon School of Fine Arts, a course he completed in 1962.
In that same year, he left for Paris, with a scholarship from the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, where he lived until 1963. In 1968, he lived in Ravenna, Italy, with a scholarship from the Instituto de Alta Cultura. Between 1964 and 1972, he was Assistant Professor of Painting at ESBAL.
In 1972, he carried out a plastic intervention on wooden panels in the Sacavém branch of Banco Nacional Ultramarino.
Two years later, 1974, he participated in the collective painting commemorating the April Revolution held at the Galeria de Arte Moderna, in Belém.
In 1988, he presented the first retrospective of drawing and painting (1956-1988), at the Convento do Espírito Santo, Loulé. He directed Galerias Municipais Trem e Arco from 1990 onwards.
He carried out a retrospective of his painting (1963-1990) at the National Society of Fine Arts, Lisbon and an anthological exhibition in 1996, at Casa da Cerca – Centro de Arte Contemporânea, Almada.
In the same year, he produced the first studies for plastic intervention at the Quinta das Conchas station, Lumiar, Metropolitano de Lisboa.
He held more than three dozen individual exhibitions and almost forty group exhibitions, the artist won, among others, the Soquil Prize for Plastic Arts (1970), Arus Prize for Painting (1982, 1984st National Exhibition of Modern Art Arus), Grand Prix of Painting at the IV Vila Nova de Cerveira International Art Biennial (1993), BANIF Painting Prize (2011) and with the anthological exhibition “Fora de Escala” at the Electricity Museum in Lisbon, he was awarded the prize by the Portuguese Society of Authors for best exhibition of XNUMX.
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