Exhibition Querubim Lapa: painting and ceramics

Born in Portimão, Querubim Lapa (1925-2016) developed a vast body of work that earned him a historic place in modern art in Portugal. A remarkable painter, he stood out as one of the most consistent artists of neorealism and is now considered one of the most important ceramists of the twentieth century in the country.

On the occasion of the centenary of the artist’s birth, the Museum of Portimão dedicates this exhibition to him, the largest anthological exhibition to date and the first to articulate his painting and ceramic work. The exhibition is organized in seven sections, arranged chronologically on the two floors of the museum, making known key moments of his work, where the relationship between the two arts is clarified, along with the multiplicity of artistic languages summoned over time. In all, 94 works are gathered, belonging to national museums and private collections, including the large tile panel (1960), recently acquired by the Municipality of Portimão, whose characters and painted motifs build a magical allegory of the sea, establishing a strong relationship with the theme of fishing that the Museum of Portimão addresses.

The exhibition route begins on floor 0, reporting the period from 1946 to 1959.

Having started painting in 1945, Querubim Lapa claims to be a neorealist, while still a student, and makes drawings and paintings that modernize the realist tradition. The precarious and itinerant life of the social sub-strata, the pause of exploited labor, often linked to the life of the sea, and the condition of women, acquire all the prominence, implying a work of resistance to the Salazar dictatorship.

In the course of the 1950s, there was an inflection in the artist’s painting. The social themes remain, now mediated by a lyricism that favors the opening of color and the accentuated volumization of forms, which tend to be abstracted and admit surrealizing formulations. The human figure becomes hieratic and the painting gains sculptural value.

The approach of painting to ceramics is intuited and justifies the first ceramic nucleus of the exhibition. Alongside the major architectural integration projects, which began in 1954, with the wall cladding of the Restelo Shopping Centre in Lisbon, the artist designed ceramic panels for various interiors, along with a wide range of decorative objects that revisited popular utilitarian ceramics and modernised it. Hybrid figures, where human beings, animals, plants and objects are interrelated, form a new humorous repertoire based on a system of production of a single piece, which the artist practices throughout his work.

The four sections presented on the 1st floor bring together unavoidable phases of Querubim Lapa’s artistic production, developed between the 1960s and 1990s.

The years 1962 and 1963 are central to his ceramics. From this short period date the famous interventions in the Mexican pastry shop and Casa da Sorte, in Lisbon, and the project for the Hotel do Mar, in Sesimbra.

It was also at this time that the artist produced a wide series of ceramic plates, based on the invention of new techniques, based on contrasts of glazes and glazes. The aesthetic results are surprising and vary between the formation of agglomerates, mixtures and separation of colors, watery passages, crackles, stains, transparencies and opacities. In them we find hybrid figures on the way to a general disfigurement, obtained by expressive effects that fuse painting into ceramics.

These works are confronted with a series of later plates, developed in the 1970s, which integrate the technique of assemblage, where the artist “glues”, combines and superimposes plates, crustaceans and lion’s figureheads appropriated from the faience factories Viúva Lamego and Bordalo Pinheiro on smoother or more relief, more expressive or almost monochromatic backgrounds. Also noteworthy are the experiments with scale and the cut-out shape of some pieces.

The painting of this period follows a similar path. In 1963, the artist created a set of textured and expressive canvases, with a quick, gestural brushstroke, which took form to the limits of its recognition through an informalist language. Bodies elongate, are rough, contorted, approach the grotesque, or give rise to explosions of iridescent colors. The emphasis on the materiality of the painting presupposes spontaneity and the human form, almost primitive, is intuited as raw clay.

In 1974, Claude Monet’s Water Lilies are used as a central reference in a new series of paintings. The canvas and the iconographic elements of Monet’s paintings are disassembled, metamorphosed and reorganized by Querubim Lapa, in order to create overlaps and unfoldings of planes that interrogate the space and the elements of the painting. The subject of painting is now painting itself: its history and its technical conventions.

The exhibition ends with a nucleus of cascade tile panels of geometric composition, made between 1992 and 1994. They reinterpret the beginnings of Portuguese tiles, especially the green and white checkered tile from the sixteenth century, which covers the walls of the Swan Room of the National Palace of Sintra, and sometimes combine other techniques: engobe, sponge and cutout. They can articulate insignia, biomorphic elements, and pattern effects; tensions between optical illusions and aspects of concretist painting, and to assume full abstraction, establishing perceptual games and contiguities between the forms of the interior elements and the very format of the panels. Taken together, they constitute a major example of postmodernist ceramics in Portugal.

Curatorship: Sofia Nunes