Marcelino Macedo Vespeira was born on September 9, 1925 in Samouco, Alcochete, Portugal. Vespeira defined his artistic penchant as resulting from a triple inheritance: from his mother, a lace weaver (whom he described as endowed with "interior geometry"), he got his inventiveness and taste for literature; from his father, the knowledge of nature; and from his childhood in a changing riverside and culturally diverse landscape, his taste for irreverence and fascination with the world.
In 1937 he entered to the António Arroio School of Decorative Arts in Lisbon. In 1942 he enrolled in the architecture course of the High School of Fine Arts of Lisbon, which he left in the same year due to political differences with the director Cunha Bruto.
He worked with Fernando Azevedo and other young artists for the ETP (Estúdio Técnico de Publicidade) where he designed posters, logos and shop windows.
In 1947, after a split with the neorealist aesthetics, he became co-founder of the Surrealist Group of Lisbon in October, along with names like José-Augusto França, Fernando Azevedo, Mário Cesariny, Alexandre O'Neill and others.
He began, then, a first surrealist phase in his painting. In August of 1949 he spent a season in the islands Berlengas in the company of Fernando Lemos. The direct contact with the sea and the wild nature of the island produced an extraordinary effect on his work, guiding it to a more spontaneous formal and symbolic confluence of abstract value. In 1951, the influence of Flemish dance marked the beginning of a phase in which the rhythm of music and dance determined the formal development of his painting, closing the cycle of direct influence of surrealist aesthetics.
In 1952 he made his first solo exhibition together with Fernando Azevedo and Fernando Lemos. The following year he was one of the chosen ones to represent Portugal in the 2nd Biennial of Modern Art of São Paulo, Brazil.
In 1955 he discovered jazz and his painting came to intuit the free and abstract rhythms of this modern and cosmopolitan aesthetic. In 1956, on a trip to Africa, Mozambique he was fascinated, in particular, by the rhythms and tribal dances which decisively influenced his painting.
In 1959 Vespeira abandoned and diluted the rhythmic tension of well defined forms to give more value to a spatial fusion of the whole. This phase continued for almost a decade.
In 1989 he painted his last oil Fontela due to a serious illness that forces the painter to abandon his work. From this date, several retrospective exhibitions of his work were carried out.
He died on February 22, 2002.
Highly coherent, the work of Marcelino Vespeira reveals a pictorial universe that is harmonious, poetic and theatrical, combining precise drawing skills and a sensual palette with rigorous lighting and endless irony and the joy of being.
His artwork was honoured by the Montijo Municipality with the creation of the Vespeira Prize in 1985, and by the AICA, which gave him an award in 2000.
