Plastic artist Manuel Baptista dies

Artist Manuel Baptista died this Saturday in Lisbon at the age of 87, João Pinharanda, artistic director of the EDP Foundation’s Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology (MAAT), told Lusa.

“The EDP Foundation deeply regrets the death in Lisbon of the artist Manuel Baptista, an artist who is part of his art collection and was the subject of an important exhibition at Central Tejo, Fora de Escala, in 2012,” reads if not reported.

“To his family, especially the artist Maria José Oliveira, a companion for many decades, we express our sincere condolences,” Joao Pignaranda added.

Joaquim Manuel Guerreiro Baptista was born in Faro in 1936 and graduated in painting in Lisbon in 1962 at the School of Fine Arts, where he taught for a while, said the director of MAAT.

Fellow of the Gulbenkian Foundation in Paris in 1963 and of the Italian Institute in Ravenna in 1968. He also lived for long periods in the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), where from 1977 to 1980 he established important contacts with collectors. and galleries,” he pointed out, emphasizing that “in Portugal [a obra de Manuel Baptista] unites all major museum collections, and [este] maintained constant activity in the gallery universe.”

Dividing his time between Lisbon and Faro, he developed in that Algarve city “an important artistic and pedagogical mission when, in the 1990s, he directed two municipal galleries, Trem and Arco, representing a wide range of historical and young artists.”

“Several national awards (Soquil, 1970; Arus, 1982; Bienal de Cerveira, 1984; BANIF, 1993) and several anthological and retrospective exhibitions of his work (Loulé, 1988; SNBA, 1990; or Casa da Cerca, Almada, 1996) have guaranteed his recognition,” continued one of the veterans of Portuguese curation and art history.

Pinharanda emphasized that in 2012 Manuel Baptista received the Autores Prize awarded by the Portuguese Society of Authors (SPA) for an exhibition presented at the Museum of Electricity (currently MAAT) of the EDP Foundation, and that “this exhibition revealed an unknown facet of his work, realizing projects sculptures and installations of the 1960s and 1970s and giving a new critical dimension to his work, close to international pop music in themes (everyday objects), materials (neon, plexiglass, metal) and scale (with solutions that the name justified exhibitions: “Out of scale”.

“His work is numerous and difficult to classify: it has evolved in the fields of painting, drawing and installation, in a constant tension between figuration and non-figuration, between landscape design and an almost poppy fascination with everyday life,” he noted.

“The rocks of his native Algarve could be imagined as huge festive sculptures or structures depicted in gloomy drawings; overlapping cutouts could be thin windows into the plant world; the simplest geometric shapes could turn into monochrome paintings (circles, pentagons). , triangles), but where the surface was enriched by successive layers of cuts, forming thin reliefs and hatching, or semicircles turned into thin and complex fans, ”he described.

According to Joao Pinharanda, Manuel Baptista was preparing a new global retrospective of his work at the Faro Museum and the Trem Gallery by next July.

“His completion will confirm the importance and uniqueness of his work,” he concluded.