J. C. A. Vidal, “The invisible paintings of Pedro Calapez”

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 that he puts into his production exists alongside the dreamlike manifestations of a creation that is fundamentally directed at the senses. Which is an aspect that likens him to the creators of all-over painting with whom he has admitted he shares a desire to cover the viewers of his painting in a chromatic field1 . Calapez’s creation, through different formal solutions, expresses a small number of themes and proposals that he persistently repeats in…  (read the full article)