ARTUR DO CRUZEIRO SEIXAS

par Françoise Py

February 23, 2020

Artur do Cruzeiro Seixas is still wonderfully active today at the age of 100. His first surrealist paintings date back to 1942. He was only 22 years old but had already found his privileged forms of expression, art and poetry, and his universe, surrealism, to which he would remain faithful throughout his life. In 1947, he participated in the exhibition of the "Os Surrealistas" group and joined the Portuguese surrealist group founded by Mario Cesariny.

André Breton had defined surrealism as "pure psychic automatism." He considered automatism to be the "keystone" of the movement. Artur is, along with André Masson, the artist who par excellence gave automatic drawing its full measure. He draws brilliantly, in an almost secondary state. He gives birth to an unprecedented universe where all kingdoms merge. A rapid, incisive stroke, without repentance. With him, the pen "runs on paper," according to Breton's expression, and with a continuous stroke, carves forms in transformation. Artur's decisive contribution to surrealism is precisely this uninterrupted practice of automatic drawing. Few artists have made it their exclusive mode of expression like he has.

From his first paintings, we find affinities with De Chirico's universe. Endless expanses animated by funny statues. Vertiginous scale breaks. De Chirico's universe draws its strength from the almost total absence of living beings. Statues have replaced men, immobility reigns supreme. In this world of doubles, objects have taken the place of figures, specters that of men. Scenographies empty of human or animal presence, "metaphysical" interiors.

Conversely, Artur's painting is an ode to life and movement. In this Dionysian universe, everything moves, everything animates, forms are born in incessant transformation. Not an object that doesn't become alive. And because life constantly reinvents itself, creatures unite, merge, hybridize to form plural bodies. Artur Cruzeiro Seixas is the Michelangelo of his time. In him everything takes body. Post-modern bodies, multiple and polymorphous.

A body-boat-landscape adjoins an arm emerging from the ground. Boats have legs and wings. A single kingdom synthesizes all kingdoms. The mineral, vegetable and animal intertwine, merge and blend to unify in a great chimeric family. The four elements exchange their prerogatives: fire freezes, glaciers ignite, earth is navigable, one can walk on water.

André Breton dreamed of finding the Sublime Point where opposites would cease to be perceived contradictorily, where oppositions would be overcome, sublimated, without being denied. The overcoming of old antinomies is at the heart of surrealism. André Breton makes the quest for this supreme Point his very objective.

Artur has immediately found this point in his work, and leads us there tirelessly.

De Chirico had introduced scale breaks and a multiplicity of viewpoints, which creates a labyrinthine space in which the viewer loses their bearings and experiences new mental associations. In Artur, the process is pushed even further: viewpoints differ from one part to another of the represented elements. Thus a hand can be drawn in close-up, very close, while the arm is considerably distant. Not only is no element or fragment of element at its proper size, but distances within the same drawing are arbitrary. The principle of metamorphosis that commands the figures is extended to the entire space. The plasticity of forms creates a kinetic space where everything animates, prepares to take off. His work is an invitation to travel. Horses, boats, sailboats, bicycles, flying machines topped with banners abound. Wings are in him the natural attribute of everything that lives, and it is not uncommon for men or horses to be provided with them. The sailor he was, the tireless adventurer, creates vast spaces and object-creatures made to traverse them in all directions.

But while everything indicates imminent movement, on the verge of taking flight, paradoxically, everything immobilizes, embraces a pedestal or attempts to anchor itself in the ground. The tension is extreme between the drilling power of bodies taking root, and their momentum to free themselves from gravity and launch into space. Few artists have to this point dynamized opposites to sublimate them, creating within each drawing or gouache fertile tensions that sharpen the senses. These oppositions play a catalytic role, potentiating emotions and favoring the liberation of the powers of imagination.

If he is an incomparable draftsman, Seixas is also a painter who has happily explored all techniques, including collages and cut papers. He has also created a large number of surrealist objects that equal the most famous achievements in this field. It is a way for the artist to engage in dialogue with his predecessors and in particular with André Breton's group. Many of his objects echo the most famous surrealist objects. These are useless and absurd objects that seem to laugh at themselves. Objects of black humor. Thus, in 1954, The Daily, a porcelain cup whose handle presents itself inside. It's a wink to another Lunch, that of Meret Oppenheim (1936) where the inside of the cup is covered with fur. Here reigns the nonsense dear to Lewis Carroll, the nonsense, the paradox in its pure state. A Teapot without handle with the spout coming out of the lid. A tap topped with a feather and fixed to a ball. This ridiculous object is placed on a pedestal meant to magnify it. It's The Oppressor. The title is in French, as if to better mark the symbolic attachment to the Paris group. From 1953, a poem-object, assemblage of elements found as such in nature: a horseshoe, driftwood, a plank. The photograph of an eye is a pretext for a calligram whose text, again, is in French. It's a Chimera where the object (driftwood), the animal (horseshoe) and the human (the eye) hybridize into a kind of foot-head both fascinating and disturbing. We can read: "an uninterrupted rumble similar to that of a waterfall, it's the splashing of a small stream amplified by the rock." This Chimera is not without evoking Pegasus, the winged horse, born from Medusa's blood, whose presence, occult or manifest, haunts his work. From 1959, a poem painting where we can read: "the man who had fallen asleep crosses the village to throw himself into the void."

Perhaps because they were very isolated and the dictatorship made any meeting difficult, the Lusitanian surrealists, more than others, practiced collective works and privileged dialogue that André Breton considered as the very essence of the art he defended. These works in dialogue, realized at the very beginning of the Portuguese movement in 1947 and pursued by the artists throughout their lives, are truly one of their specificities.

By renewing with the form, invented by the French group in 1925, of the Exquisite Corpse, the Portuguese artists express their fidelity to surrealist ideals as André Breton formulated them in his Manifesto: "It is still to dialogue that the forms of surrealist language adapt best." To create exquisite corpses is immediately to place one's art under the sign of friendship and dialogue.

But while the French group invents complex forms of verbal creations by several, true magical dialogues, their drawn exquisite corpses are generally rapid drawings, almost spontaneous. With Artur and his friends, the drawn exquisite corpse becomes complex and abandons the basic structure which was that of the "figure" with, on a vertical format, an anatomical distribution: head, torso, legs, to become a work in its own right, without losing anything of its experimental and playful dimension.

The Portuguese surrealists, both poets and painters, made the exquisite corpse a mode of expression in its own right in which friends, with totally different universes and often opposite techniques, make common work. Artur, past master in the art of synthesizing extremes, while keeping intact the violence of oppositions, immediately felt at ease in works in dialogue. He practiced them throughout his life, first with Mario Cesariny, then with the sculptor Isabel Meyrelles, the friend of always, who translated his poems into French and devoted herself to making him better known in France.

The Perve Galeria preserves, from 2006, a set of exquisite corpses realized by Cruzeiro Seixas, Fernando José Francisco and Mario Cesariny. The horizontal format of the sheet favors the creation of a vast space in which various elements confront each other. Carlos Cabral Nunes gathered in 2010, in an exhibition entitled Too Exquisite Corpses, the three accomplices: Artur Cruzeiro Seixas, Isabel Meyrelles and Benjamin Marques to whom Cabral Nunes himself joined to execute serigraphs/collages from their crossed works. Cruzeiro Seixas and Marques realized exquisite corpses in black ink in large format. These very accomplished drawings open the doors of the kingdom of chimeras.

In addition to the exquisite corpses proper, where one only discovers at the end the contribution of the other, the Portuguese artists have also created collaborative works, in the very contemporary sense of the term. They practiced in painting, drawing or sculpture what the French surrealists had done with writing. Thus, The Magnetic Fields were born from two unconscious minds magnetized by each other, thanks to automatic writing, thus pulverizing the notion of author. This inaugural experience of writing by several, attempted in 1919 by André Breton and Philippe Soupault, will be renewed on different occasions. It was a question of calling into question the paternity of a work and the unity of style. The exhibition entitled Too Exquisite Corpse emphasized the overcoming of the exquisite corpse towards collaborative work. Isabel Meyrelles has been working in Paris since 1950. An aesthetic of the chimeric federates her works. She created with Artur a certain number of sculptures that bear both their signatures. From a drawing, she recreates the volumes and missing parts. She invents a reverse to the image that can only show, in two dimensions, a single face. From their collaboration will be born hybrid creatures of great sensuality.

Artur engages with Mario Botas in a poetics of air in collaborative works that momentarily subtract the viewer from the harsh laws of gravity. The crossed works of Alfredo Luz and Artur propose an incursion into the domain of water and dreams. Very recently, it's the great Portuguese poet valter hugo mãe who plays at populating Artur's unlimited spaces with his tender hybrids. In a dreamlike universe, the acephalous figures of the "imprudently poetic" writer dialogue with Artur's funny statues. In mad weddings, the willingly sharp and cutting forms of one unite with the round and dilated forms of the other.

Artur Cruzeiros Seixas invites us to venture with him into a magical universe where old antinomies are overcome, contradictions transcended. The way he practices the surrealist image acts as an alchemical principle, an energy transformer.

Posted online February 2020