Untitled

VOLUME, SURFACE AND INCISIONLong before his painting was invaded by the bright colours that fill it now, before opting for the cold of aluminium as a support for the large composite panels that he later made, before the formatted canvases that he uses now, Pedro Calapez’s painting found landscape as its working field. From early on the definition of volumes that seemed to be dry, almost lunar landscapes composed horizons that corresponded to a search in painting that was common to other artists of his generation, like Pedro Cabrita Reis. In Calapez’s case, the earthy tone and the bare volume almost defined a lineage that started at Dominguez Alvarez and was hurled into the need for a return to painting that stirred up the eighties. Yet in his painting there were two components at large that would be multiplied in different formulations: the drawing, scratched out over the painted surface (a procedure that was opposite to the tradition of the overlaying of paint) and the volume, the space that was defined as a field, a mountain, a room. For a long time these components marked the development of his work, namely when the space became transformed into the space for the installation of the works, in the studiolo model, and these were converted into elements that themselves formed a landscape – and not just its depiction. The drawing would establish an axis of definition and would always be a counterpoint to the mass of paint, to the brush-stroke, as if Calapez lived his path between the matter-based tradition of Renoir and the drawing of Matisse, converted into incision, into a surface wound. So this painting and these drawings by Pedro Calapez are the memory of the beginning of his career, but they also bear witness to the how of the future development of his work.Delfim Sardo