When Manuel Amorim's parents divorced, his father told him that his mother was dead; the 4 year-old believed him. He moved in with his grandparents and didn't see his father again for seven years. From this childhood experience came feelings of loss and alienation and a sense of being adrift in a vast, unknowable world.
Clues to the meaning of Amorim's existential paintings can be found in his past, but they are only fragments. Enigmatic, spiritual and psychological, his work contains symbols that might come straight from dreams-whether nightmare or fantasy is hard to say. The central figure is an archetypal everyman, cast as a shadowy silhouette. Whether walking like a giant around the curved circumference of the Earth, suspending from a rope or darting across an abyss, he is presented as a character moving solo in the universe.
"My paintings are like a fragment of present or past time," Amorim, who is a native of Lisbon, Portugal and a long-time resident of France, notes. "They are a diary of meditations... I try to reveal man as an element of the cosmic totality, as a material constellation, directly participating in the cosmic fate."
With its shallow depth-of-field, primitive forms and rough textures, Amorim's style is reminiscent of cave paintings. He uses color in vivid, pared-down fashion, washing the backgrounds in fields of luscious purples and oranges, but leaving the figures largely colorless. His people have been described as "veiled like an x-ray shadow," with a presence "only there to signify an absence," like the "diffuse memory of a body that has left or vanished."
The techniques he uses in the making of his paintings are as provocative as the subjects. Amorim applies dry pigments, sand and resin with rags, brushes and sponges, sometimes working on the floor or on the wall, in a highly physical process. The result, which can be almost photographic in detail, seems to replicate nature. In the mottled surfaces, we see images that might be read as clouds, or striated tree trunks or the jagged tendrils of leaves.
Amorim was born in 1950 in an upscale, modern neighborhood in Lisbon. His father was a successful architect, and when Amorim was in his teens, he sometimes worked in his office, making ink copies of project drawings. For much of his youth, he dealt with his loneliness by creating a rich imaginary world, sparked by books, movies and paintings, and later, through friendships with writers, actors and filmmakers. At 20, he left Portugal and his oppressive relationship with his father.
For two years, he attended the High School of Fine Arts in Paris, but most of his training came from studying the work of an eclectic group of others, from the Italian frescos of Giotto to Rembrandt's portraits to the dramatic works of Goya. He was especially moved by Hieronymous Bosch's "The Temptation of St. Anthony," which depicted one of the first Christian hermits, and the moody, abstract expressionist paintings of Mark Rothko.
"My work is about the alleviation of a tension, turned into emotional energy," he reflects on his drive to make art. "It is a technique for survival."
