1.
All things are last things after before and first things before after. Paintings, decades, texts and all the rest. It is a question of opting between finishing and starting, forward or backward. But this option is already one of the alternatives between an ordered time - before, now and later - and a constellated time, in which the present is always the virtual centre of the kaleidoscope of all the possible figures of time. Between historical absolutism and relativist pluralism. The options remain here, for the artist, if he wishes to be thus called; I continue to comment. They are parallel lines, if they are lines.

2.
Pedro Portugal's first individual exhibition was ten years ago in the Modulo Gallery in Lisbon, 1985. I commented on it. They were small oils and pastels. A code of figurative style or, more generally, a system of signs, harking back to comic strips and cartoon cinema. The approaching to the graphics was not done through any spontaneity or facility of production, but, contrarily, through a meticulous work of composition, with a constant recourse to complicated games of contrast and symmetry.
Three years and four individuals later a balance stood out, being: a vocation for the geometrical; an ironical attitude. A geometrical vocation in the strict organization of a multiplicity of points of view and in the systematical use of codes of representation. The famous irony, duly wrapped within the "quotation" or the "appropriation", in the freedom of the de-compositions and re-compositions of fragments, marks of the style or personal tics of different famous comtemporary Portuguese or foreign artists. Pedro Portugal began his methodical activity of gathering, processing and exhibiting condensed displays of contemporary artistic production, which he has continued until today.
We may say that it was here that Pedro Portugal's paintings began to be the "last". Because by looking at the paintings of his contemporaries as if they were an endangered species and reproducing them in forms also called "paintings", Pedro Portugal was trying to make paintings after the last paintings, even laster still, "more than last". And yet the process went on, everything continued to move, and all continues to continue, just like this commentary. Because this is now the constellated time of the kaleidoscope. Let us then go on.

3.
At the end of the 80's, Pedro Portugal's work expands and takes on a critical position as to the artistic, cultural, social, and political situation of Portugal. The exhibition "Kpiticos Museion" (Galeria Atlėntica, Oporto, 1989) demands upon the critics. The "Palette Aces" (Pedro Portugal, Manuel Vieira, Paulo Feliciano and Fernando Brito, Galeria Quadrum, Lisbon, 1989) stages the great beggarish parody of modern art Portuguese-style. Throughout the 90's we have witnessed a triple diversification. A diversification in the working materials - with a predominance for installations carried out with specific objects. A diversification in the social intentions of the interventions - with a strong component of ecological concerns and political critique.
A diversification in the forms of divulging the activity - with the organizing of associations of artists and research and promotion structures including, as regards the current project, the use of computerization.
No one can say if these paintings are still paintings, nor whether Pedro Portugal's art is still art, but it is precisely this doubt which guarantees us that the question as to what is art or not is still a central issue in contemporary cultural debate.
Some say that society as a whole will stop accepting art as a series of objects whose characteristics are too complex and sophisticated to be able to inspire the least amount of empathy on the level of public opinion. In that case there will be objects whose authors will wish to be called artistic but society will not accept as such.
But there are also those who say that the authors still known as artists who reject the traditional notion of art, and want their products to stop being called artistic, so that they may more fully be integrated within the daily system of social exchange, will never achieve this unless they reject their condition as authors and go back to the pure and simple state of anonymity. In that case there will then be objects that their authors wish not to be artistic but which society will accept as artistic or, alternatively, will totally ignore. Between these two possibilities, it is obviously not even necessary to choose. It is enough to continue.