"What I am asking you to do is to let loose your verve and produce an essay which radically introduces the artist Pedro Portugal: a product of Cavaquism? an airplane? a failed civil constructor? No! A true artist. But something serious, because, we've got a certain age now."
Pedro Portugal

It is always difficult to talk about Pedro Portugal. Yet it is easier than talking about his work. He escapes, turns away, he doesn't seem to want to be there. One doesn't understand whether he wants to be an artist or wants to stop being one. When I met him he was going to be an architect. At the end of the first year of ESBAL, the Lisbon Fine Arts School, that was his option. But next year there he was following the unpredictable pathways of Fine Arts. Since then he has tried to give up being an artist on many occasions, trying to decline that pompous responsibility. It seems as if there was a plot to dissuade him. We all participated in it. But when he insisted that the paintings he was working on were his last, we were all skeptical. Not he. He wanted them to be his last paintings. At a certain stage he began to quote, in a friendly game of recognition, to see how the others would react to this recognition. There was something dissuasive in these paintings, they fitted into complex and likable compositions, and the fortuitous jokes seem to say what the rest of the work said. And what, in fact, did it say? I believe that it spoke, obviously, of his life, disguising it as much as possible. But as in all his paintings, its mere happening worried its author. I believe that Pedro Portugal was perplexed, firstly because these work appeared as if out of nothing, and then because they sold. The fact that they sold made them more real, that is, it turned them into a possibility of having consequences on his life. Despite this, the irreality remained. But the surprising thing is that the life of this artist became more and more centred on Art. The breakfasts, the clothes to be ironed, the visits to the doctor, etc., took on a minimal importance in his life compared to the time he dedicated to artistic activity. Every conversation began to gravitate around the up-to-date-ness, the strategies, the possible provocations, in the dissection of the work of certain authors.

The analytical effort that Pedro Portugal put into his works made the plastic mechanism of certain authors more evident. In taking up "the best passages" of "the best authors" and combining them anthologically (and, of course; critically) in his paintings, the artist is saying that the plastic efficiency of these works predominates over any intentional context. These works do not lose these values, nor do they annul them. That would be ridiculous and pretentious. But what they intend to save is above all the efficiency of the images. And the efficiency of the images is an efficiency on life.

Thus, when we look at a country which is rotting, visually devoured by uncontrolled construction and by criminal afforestation of eucalyptus, Pedro Portugal has been the only artist capable of fearlessly expressing, in an insistent manner, his indignation for all this. This indignation may have cost him admirers and reduced the number of customers. But in his life there is a critical counterpoint which shows that his attitude was not an irresponsible act when he undertakes an afforestation project in the Quinta da Carrapata. Is it really necessary to try to make a country rich quickly and badly at the cost of its later desertification?

If Pedro Portugal's example were followed, and I hope it is, by the many landowners whose land is either abandoned or given over to easy profits (which can be turned into what? Luxury villas? Superfast cars which make their friends and neighbours drool with envy?), many catastrophes could be avoided. Next to this attitude, all the acts of pseudo-radicalism which exist in the contemporary arts in this region of southwest Iberia, with one eye more or less winking at the powers that be or at the world of international art, are mere jokes. If Pedro Portugal's work can suggest to us a nihilism which praises itself somewhat cynically, with so much rubbish being done out there, it ends up, contrarily, by showing us an unusual sense of responsibility, although this may seem "naif" to the cynics.

The artist has asked me for a biography. I have provided some details. Let us now look at some facts. Pedro Portugal was born in Castelo Branco and spent his childhood and adolescence in the interior of the Beira Baixa, a region which today is symptomatic of all the transformations in our country over the last years. While still at a young age he actively participated in the youth structures of the local PPD, which he later abandoned, yet never stoped being interested in political life.. Before he went to University he did a course in civil construction. Once in the Lisbon Fine Arts school, he was, from the beginning, one of the leading members of a group of artists who later called themselves Homeostética. At the age of only 21 he holds his first individual exhibition in the Modulo gallery in Lisbon, which is a great critical and commercial success. Despite this he tries, as I have already said, to abandon the artistic career and dedicate himself to other activities, of which the widely known Investment Company SOFIA was one of the many examples.

I could talk about his life in a more intimate manner, about his childhood memories (among which the image of a peacock's tail feather stands out as a symbol of abundance, and probable reason for his passion for colours and shapes), about the trips which had most of an impression on him, about the whole war effort to reform artistic activity in this country, about the generosity with which he gives himself to his projects etc. But I will stop here, hoping not to disappoint him, and hoping that, finally, his Last Paintings stop being his last ones, but are the prelude to an activity which is inexhaustible, active, responsible and indispensable for all of us.