“until
the hours run out“

Alfredo Margarido 2006

The Caricaturist who is now called a “cartoonist”, to make a break with the past of Rafael Bordalo Pinheiro or Celso Hermínio, does not lose his punch: how could he without jeopardising his own mission? Isn’t it him who is the representative of public scrutiny, who by choosing, is already on the way to criticising, the first stage of necessary rejection? And isn’t it a political scene when not only the naive but also the perverse are sacrificed? We can’t talk here about heteronomy as Fernando Pessoa forbids us from using the formula. If you would just humour me though and allow me to stress that Vasco de Castro is a heteronymous author encompassing the writer, the analyst of his own plastic creation, the caricaturist (you can say cartoonist, if you prefer) and the painter. The latter is the least well-known which we must regret in view of the fact that the complex personality of Vasco de Castro always revolved around painting. Would it be too vulgar to bring up a young student of the Faculty of Law of Lisbon who started drawing landscapes and cities with some lyricism? It was the first phase of the creator_ the young Agostinho de Castro had not discovered Europe yet and he was unaware that Agostinho is not a name which can be used honestly in those countries which reject the route, normal for us, to the hypocoristic. Vasco de Castro already assumes the second stage of the metamorphosis and casts himself as a perfect painter.

Furthermore, and inevitably, Vasco was obliged to rethink the Leonardo formula (“painting is a mental thing”), to discover that this aphorism did not contain all the violent effort of painting which must necessarily involve the body. The muscles, the hand. The 19th century learned from the Orientals, but also from the “uncivilised”, that there is no plastic production which does not pass through the body.

Vasco’s plastic proposal thus involves a reorganisation of the plastic lessons as he cannot rely on a national tradition to which he can refer, provided that it is necessary to think about the world in plastic terms. As occurred with his generation, I mean my own, Vasco de Castro learned about the world in plastic terms taking the surrealist route. Not the domestic route, always overshadowed by the phantom of gentrification, from that creative stream, but rather taking a broader route: that of the foreigner and more particularly that of Paris. Now is not the time to underline the decisive importance of that long instant, all the more so as Vasco de Castro has already told part of it, in a terse, appropriate style in “Montparnasse, mon village”. In this case, it is worth making clear one of the essential factors of this painting which categorises it in a specific plastic genealogy which is characterised by the constant recourse to “chromatic infractions”, which reinforce the violence of the break with the treatment of plastic artists in the history of western painting.Now, how are you going to recognise the soundness of the kinship between Degas, Gauguin, Van Gogh, fauves, surrealists – and more particularly a man like Juan Miró – and now this man from Tras-os-Montes metamorphised into a soul from Sintra called Vasco de Castro? The relationship between the mental side and the physical side is constant. It couldn’t be any other way: there is nothing more physical than the relationship with the canvas, the colours, which are worked on with the hand, with the fingers, with paintbrushes, which are nothing more than humanised instruments. This chromatic revolution could not have any raison d’être if it were not based on other complex areas of creation: isn’t Vasco de Castro a painter who sways between the visible face and the invisible organic, with the density of the skin hidden from the gaze? As far as the face is concerned, we can find it not before the portrait, but rather before a vaster questioning, which does not lose its relationship with physiognomy: displaying the actual structure of personality, which the face would reveal opposing the desire to conceal of the person portrayed. The plastic trap is defined in this way, in the knowledge that consciousness is impenetrable and unrepresentable. But what else can we do except insist, repeat the same motion, try to give back senses and ears to those who have lost them? So that’s why, without giving back senses and ears to those who have lost them? So that’s why, without any nostalgia, Vaso de Castro throws himself into a complementary operation which consists of representing the organic, or rather, his sense.  The most extreme and most complementary operations find common ground in painting: the orgasm and defecation. Wasn’t it the Bedouins who explained, back in the 15th century, that it was best to cover the mouth because the latter, like the anus, was a repository of bad odours?  This was expected of Bedouin good manners and the others couldn’t help but follow this trail, that people should cover their mouths, eliminating bad odours. Painting only has a raison d’être if it is able to add to nature. The faces and bodies or the entrails of painting can only be understood through their relationship with the nature of Painting. If Vasco had already rejected the easy trap of lyricism a long time ago, now he was rejecting the simply naturalist confusion. Painting is creating another nature. Under these conditions, painting cannot cease to constitute violence intended to reinforce the violence of any kind of nature. That’s why the painter is the one who refuses any fallacious pretexts to announce the end of history: the creator’s text requires the space and function of creation to be expanded. To put it another way: the painter is the one who adds nature to nature. Plastic nature, self-evidently. Is there any other?