João Cutileiro

Portuguese sculptor (1937), early realized which artistic field he wanted to work. With only 9 years old he was invited to draw at a studio, thus taking advantage to make contact with artists, sculptors and critics interested in Surrealism. At the age of 12, Cutileiro attends Jorge Barradas’ studio, where he shapes, paints and executes glazed ceramics. Tired of this experience, and now with 14 years old, he shifts to António Duarte’s studio, where spends the following two years as a volunteer assistant stoneworker. It is in this period that Cutileiro starts to work the stone, as his job at António Duarte’s studio was enlarging the master stoneworker’s models, passing them into plaster and then translating that plaster into marble. He attended the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Lisbon between 1953 and 1954 and, feeling that there was no space for the creativity and experimentalism that so much characterise his work in Portugal, Cutileiro is brought to London in 1955 by Paula Rego, where he enrolls at the Slade School of Art.

From his search of a path of his own result his first articulated figures (1964). In 1964 Cutileiro starts using electric machines to cut the stone, which allowed him to dedicate exclusively to marble.
Despite having conquered an enviable position in the Portuguese sculpture scene and despite his artworks being very coveted nowadays, after executing “D. Sebastião”(at Gil Eanes square, in Lagos – 1970 – when he returned to Portugal), very little of Cutileiro’s monuments were raised publicly. This is due to the fact that Cutileiro is a controversial artist with aesthetics of his own, which came to break what was established in sculpture so far.

www.joaocutileiro.blogspot.pt