https://issuu.com/pedrocalapez/docs/2015_12_revista_aena_39_calapez_ent … [Read more...]

Delfim Sardo, a conversation with Calapez You began your career in painting but before that you were a photographer. Did your work in that field have an effect on the work you have developed in painting? The other day I was just thinking about that. I held two exhibitions of photographs, although professionally I was a commercial photographer. I’m not sure whether there is a … [Read more...]

The artistic path of Pedro Calapez (Lisbon, 1953) is as broad as it is consequent. With initial training devoted to engineering and an early dedication to photography, Calapez holds his first solo exhibition in 1982, in the Galeria Diferença, in Lisbon. Two decades later he is rightly held as one of the most well-known and valorised Portuguese artists. The constructive nature … [Read more...]

Transcription of a conversation-interview conducted on Sylt Island, in Northern Germany, at an artists’ residence organised by the Sylt Quelle Kunst Raum. On a sunny, cloudy day, I was asked What isn’t art? Or: What isn’t art anymore? Do you have to have a special talent? Love or money? What is important today? Why do I buy? Do I sell the art I make? Is it a trade? Where or … [Read more...]

For this exhibition in the Casa da Cerca, Branca e neutra claridade [White and Neutral Clarity], Calapez has decided to start chronologically at the end of the last century, with the series Desenhos contínuos [Continuous Drawings], from 1999. Five large-scale drawings in dry pastel on paper, which depict a sort of forest, a wood synthesised in a ballet of lines drawn out by the … [Read more...]

Emília Ferreira: What is the founding element in your work? Drawing or colour? Pedro Calapez: If one thinks in historical terms, the first works are drawings, but drawings that have a structure similar to painting. They are not the founding drawings for painting nor for any other works, study drawings... They have nothing to do with the idea of the drawing as a concept. They … [Read more...]

It is now commonplace to state that the matter with which artists work comes from that which has already been worked on by their peers. The genetic lines that are thus set out and rooted create the imaginary and grammar of each artist. To gaze on the gaze of another, to see the real world through the filter of imagination, of the hand, of another person is artists’ favourite … [Read more...]

Pedro Calapez (Lisbon, 1953) occupies a prominent position on the contemporary Portuguese art scene, particularly in a filed like the pictorial, in which the main authorities of his country, celebrated internationally over the last decades, are currently showing signs of exhaustion. Pedro Calapez’s interests have moved him over three decades of artistic activity to draw up … [Read more...]

Post-modernism, with its stressing of stylistic pluralism – the profusion of artistic trends that are indifferently validated by the critical exercise – has stood as the hegemonic cultural logic of contemporaneity. The beginning of this process dates from post World War II, when the neoavant-gardes of the 1960s put into practice the Duchampian legacy of the readymade, thus … [Read more...]

Pedro Calapez is one of the most successful painters in the current national art scene. It would be easy to keep his course without modifying his work. However, Calapez inhabits painting with a sense of crisis, constantly destabilizes his own practice introducing new challenges, new ways of painting, new media. On one of my first visits to his atelier, I noticed a couple of … [Read more...]

Interview by João Sousa Cardoso April 1999 Published in nº 4 of the magazine “desvio 256” Calapez is a painter who paints. Paintings you would hang on your walls; an artist who produces concrete objects for the contemplation of the viewer. He is guided by an intimate, individual and incessant dialogue with the quality of his materials and stands for the currency of an … [Read more...]