Freehand: António Sena’s works in the EDP Foundation Art Collection

The work of António Sena (1941-2024, Lisbon) encompasses painting and drawing, disciplines widely represented in the EDP Foundation Art Collection. This exhibition showcases key examples of such practices, with works from the 1960s to the first decade of this century. Thus, tribute is paid to one of our most influential artists, who passed away last year, in ARCOlisboa, both a national and international stage.

The scarcity or simplification of chromatism, the rarefaction of pictorial matter with the frequent revelation of the raw canvas, bring António Sena's paintings closer to the idea and practice of drawing, defining his extraordinary contribution to Portuguese art.

António Sena did not practice representational drawing – objects are rarely present in his works and, even then, reduced to the schematism of a sign language that is always ambiguous. His works are closer to writing and calculation, but in a way that is also ambiguous. Letters and numbers that follow in a careless way (or clearly challenge) the composition on a staff or grid or complex texts, usually repeated in series, are sabotaged by seismic, overlapping, disordered, and deliberately illegible handwriting.

Are we faced with a game of cyphers and secrets to be unraveled, or exercises of intense freedom and pleasure in writing? António Sena leads us beyond the image and the text to an understanding of the abstract rhythms that fill the spaces (full and empty, vertical and horizontal), creating a kind of visual prosody, evoking the gesture of drawing at the basis of ideographic and then alphabetic writing, but leaving the verbal interpretation that justifies them in suspense.

In the body of work we present in this exhibition, these attributes become evident. Untitled (1972), from his London period, presents and names a flag, bordering on the expressive sensibility of British Pop; untitled (1975), a painting with collage, quotes a set of newspapers from the so-called “Hot Summer” and evokes, without rhetoric, the revolutionary period. The works (all untitled, 2002) presented at the third and final edition of the EDP Art Drawing Award in 2002, which he won, and the works Poème sur le désastre de Lisbonne (II), from the “Les cahiers de Voltaire” series (2005-2006) or DN 1911 (2009-2011), which he presented at his solo exhibition at the EDP Foundation (Cinzeiro 8, 2014), accentuate the drama that is always latent in his work: sacred chalices or cinerary urns, full quotes from Voltaire's poem on the Lisbon’s great earthquake (1755), the inscription, in continuous, almost indecipherable writing, and again on the pages of a newspaper (on the specific date of his mother's birth), excerpts from The Book of Disquiet by Bernardo Soares/Fernando Pessoa.

António Sena's drawing hand creates a permanent tension between the rules imposed by language and orthography and the desire for liberation from those rules; it challenges the structure of meaning, teaching us the path to the signifying freedom of images.

João Pinharanda

Director, MAAT – Museum of Art, Architecture, and Technology