Background
Pedro Calapez was born on February 24, 1953 in Lisbon, Portugal.
Instituto Superior Técnico of Lisbon
School of Fine Arts in Lisbon
Pedro Calapez was born on February 24, 1953 in Lisbon, Portugal.
Pedro began his studies in civil engineering at the Instituto Superior Técnico of Lisbon, transferring in 1976 to the School of Fine Arts in Lisbon. Later he attended the Artistic Training Course of the National Society of Fine Arts.
While a student at the Faculty of Fine Arts, Pedro Calapez worked as a professional photographer, having dedicated himself more intensively to painting since 1985. Between 1986 and 1998 he was a professor at Art Contemporary in Lisbon, having been responsible for the drawing and painting departments. He began to participate in exhibitions in the 70s, having arranged his first individual exhibition in 1982.
In the national context, Pedro Calapez is one of the most recognized names, appearing in the so-called "return to painting" decade, the 1980s, together with artists Pedro Cabrita Reis, José Pedro Croft, Rui Sanches, Rosa Carvalho, and Ana Léon. His work has been shown in several galleries and museums both in Portugal and abroad, with particular emphasis on individual exhibitions.
In addition to the exhibitions, individual and collective, he participated in the Biennial of Venice in 1986. Calapez held also set designs for shows, as well as performed various works public having designed one square for the exhibition "World of Lisbon" in 1998 and one panel ceramic for the Metropolitan of Lisbon. In the German-speaking part of Europe, his work was shown 1999 at the Kunstmuseum Bonn, the exhibition “Tage der Dunkelheit und des Lichts.” The artist currently lives and works in Lisbon.
Expansion rather than concentration is an obvious driving power in the artistic language of Pedro Celapez, who is working in the field between drawing and painting, figurative expression and abstraction.
Quotations: “My major concern is always the discussion of the edges of painting. I want the picture to extend beyond those. In a determined space my paintings together form a single piece that I cannot imagine being broken up in different walls. Each painting goes beyond itself, each wall is a painting by itself; this does not allow the gaze to be fixed, it is all around. The fact is that your look dominates the reason why you keep looking at a painting; the eye takes over control of the way in which we look at a picture. Reason invokes a discourse made up of these fragments of vision. You penetrate/enter the painting by the invoking of its own details. It is not the general idea of a painting that is important, but the small stroke or line. What is important is the particular, the detail."
