Artur Bual

Born in Lisbon, in 1926, he was a Portuguese plastic artist who, in a decisive way, influenced art in Portugal in the second half of the 20th century.

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Although a sculptor and ceramist, it is as a gesturalist painter that his artistic work is most recognized. Indeed, gesturalism began in Portuguese painting in 1958 with Artur Bual and it was here that it reached, and still maintains, its highest aesthetic expression.

 

Bual appears in the Portuguese artistic milieu in the 1950s. A time of some misunderstandings, but also of intense creative ebullition, in which abstract art, until then dispersed, is seen as a vanguard between / or against, neorealism and the surrealism, which were, since the end of World War II, the modern movements that waved the flags the loudest. His name is among the abstract artists from Portugal that the March Gallery (1952-54) brought together "in full parade for the first time" in April 1954 at the 1st Salon of Abstract Art organized by the historian and art critic referred to in the beginning of these lines, but his painting had not yet found its own direction at that time: abstractionism, although likely on its horizon, was nothing more than a trend. Bual did not have any particularly nameable aesthetic affiliation and as for his position in the face of the question of the moment: "what was it to be figurative or non-figurative?" neither rejected nor submitted to the representation of the real.

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What his painting actually tended to represent (this would lead him, precisely, to gesturalism) was the very act of painting.

However, his paintings were seen in the main "collective exhibitions" of the time (the SNBA's Gerais de Artes Plásticas, several exhibitions at the Pórtico Gallery, the 1st Plastic Arts Exhibition of the C. Gulbenkian Foundation, etc.), until, in 1958, they were exhibited , at the 1st SNBA Modern Art Salon, his first gestural painting.

That painting was among the best exhibited there and, to a certain extent in opposition to them due to its originality in the Portuguese artistic panorama, where "the groups associated with young painters" still sought to prove abstractionism for the "first-born reason of the species", that is that is, leafing through albums by Paul Klee, Kandinsky, Malevitch, and, "in the most desperate cases," by Mondrian, all already illuminated by the perpetual light of history.

 

The expression "in opposition to", referring to Artur Bual's first gestural painting, comes from a review by JA França published at the time, where that critic highlighted "the courage to sail on the high seas" that Bual had achieved with his new way of paint and pointed out what distinguished her in the Salon as a whole: "an expressionism whose scenographic power was(was) with that of a non-figurative current of American origin and little European understanding".

 

This American current was abstract expressionism, which in turn had a European genesis (Hartung, wols, Soulages, for example), but had acquired great prominence in America com tobey, Kline e pollock, between others.

 

He held several exhibitions in Portugal and abroad. He is represented in several collections: Palace of Justice in Lisbon, Modern Art Center of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, National Museums, City Councils, Professional Training Center of Pegões, Regional Government of the Azores, etc. He executed several frescoes in twelve chapels, in Alentejo and Ribatejo.

 

Death in Amadora in 1999.