19 May to 15 October 2006, Camjap, Lisboa

In commemoration of the 100th anniversary of the birth of the painter Dominguez Alvarez (Oporto, 1906-1942), this exhibition at Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation's Modern Art Centre (CAM), curated by Ana Vasconcelos e Melo and Emília Ferreira, revisits the oeuvre of one of the most fascinating and disquieting painters form Portugal's so-called 'second modernism'. Assembling a collection of approximately two-hundred works, selected from paintings and drawings, it presents several works to the public for the first time, including four albums of small-sized drawings and paintings on paper, made during the artist's travels in the north of Portugal and Spain.

Descending from Galician parents, the artist José Cândido Dominguez Alvarez is particularly well represented in the Modern Art Centre collection, with 39 paintings and drawings, and has been present in all the exhibition circles around Portuguese art in the 20th and 21st centuries. Founding member of ‘+Além’, a group that gathered in Oporto, in April 1929, a number of 'modern' voices, from architects to painters, focused in opposing the series of posthumous homage to Marques de Oliveira. Alvarez is one of the signatories of the manifest ‘Em Defesa da Arte’ (In Defence of Art) that declared that art mustn't be only the evidence of a skill, but rather ‘something that screams, confronts us and opens our sensibility’.

Alvarez's very short artistic career – coinciding with fourteen years of academic studies, interrupted by trips to Spain and periods of illness, consumption of which he eventually died at the age of thirty six – was nevertheless prolific, and the artist left behind several hundreds works.

Landscape painter in imagination and vocation (he liked to call himself ‘the greatest landscape painter of the Peninsula’), synthesizing and reinventing sceneries based on the nature he visited in his Iberian travels, he explored the topics of urban and rural landscapes in Oporto, Minho, Galicia and Castile, scenes of a specific daily life, dark and crooked male figures, admirable shapes in the rain, portraits of characters in the foreground on background landscapes, and the imposing towers of Spanish cathedrals in Segovia and mostly Santiago de Compostela. Developing a language of his own, at times quite syncretic in its citations, or rather in its intuitions, with expressionist and surrealist shades, Alvarez became a classic; not just in the solid knowledge of materials and visual solutions, but also in the repetition of a small number of subjects, with a passion, a surrender to ‘painting as painting‘. Curiously, this artist that signed Oporto's modernist manifest, graduated in 1940 with a classification of 20/20 from the same school where the old master Marques de Oliveira left a strong mark of his preference for topics and expressions so dear to late naturalism.

In Alvarez (especially since 1932, the year of his first known detailed, almost photographic experiments) we find this apparently non-conflicting and even concurrent combination of visual expressions, served by a confident sense of drawing, with remarkable formal and chromatic compositions, based on visual matrixes that in other works of his remain true to an apparent placid naturalist representation.

In parallel with his painting activity, and in result of his travels in Spain, Alvarez became a specialist in Spanish painting, confessing his admiration for Zuloaga, ‘a baroque heir of El Greco that deciphered the harsh topics of feudal and historical Spain’, for Dario de Regoios, Basque-Asturian painter ‘founder of landscape painting in Spain’, and for Gutierrez Solana, ‘the harsh and sombre painter of the inauspicious lights’. This interest, with some nationalist contours, since he presented himself as a ‘painter form Pontevedra, living in Oporto’, lead him to organize a Galician painting exhibition, which was to be included in the ‘Galician Cultural Week’ in Oporto, in the Autumn of 1935, and that finally didn't take place to his dismay.

This new show of Dominguez Alvarez's oeuvre in Lisbon (the last exhibition if his works was in 1987, at the Almada Negreiros Gallery, from the Secretary of State for Culture) puts forward a new encounter with an artist that holds an established iconographical corpus, but whose oeuvre remains open for study. The catalogue comprises several texts by researchers, including an analysis of his oeuvre by António Trinidad Muñoz, who wrote a thesis on Alvarez for his PhD in Spain, and an overview of the material and technical aspects of his artistic production.

The exhibition can be seen from 19 May to 15 October 2006, in the gallery on Floor 01 at the Headquarters of Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, in Lisbon.

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CAMJAP
Rua Dr. Nicolau de Bettencourt
1050-078 Lisboa
www.camjap.gulbenkian.org