Noronha da Costa

Portuguese plastic artist, painter and film-maker (1942), he graduated in architecture from the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Lisbon. His first major artworks were essentially collages “in which one could identify an imagistic see of poetic character that soon was translated into the usage of illustrated magazines sheets impregnated in oil so as to bring to the same level its obverse and reverse in a double and ambiguous image [...]. Thereafter [...] he dedicated to the construction of objects, in which the use of mirrors and unpolished glasses produces inedited spatial effects”, with the intersection of the real and virtual spaces. Substantially after 1969, he fixed the parameters of his later pictorial work, frequently executed with spray gun. “The metaphoric orientation that characterises Noronha da Costa’s researches translated into [...] a painting of images (sometimes copied from classic paintings) as if they were observed from a blurring screen.” In a more systematic and passionate than others, he works intensely “the set of questions posed to Western painting after the failure of the unifying discourse of Classicism”, settling in a “discursive thinking dominated by romantic characteristics: fragmenting, decentred and subjective, individualistic, drifting and passionate, multiple and obsessive, a lot of times ironic and critical”. (We quote José-Augusto França in this biography).

His work is not limited to plastic arts, extending to the field of cinema. Throughout the years he participated in numerous group exhibitions, namely in Venice’s Biennial of 1970 (representing Portugal and AlternativaZero (1977); he hold individual exhibitions regularly in and outside Portugal, standing out his cooperation with the Galeria Nasoni, the retrospective of 1983 at the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon, and the 2003-4 exhibition at the Centro Cultural de Belém, Lisbon. In 1999 he was awarded the European Prize in Painting by the European Parliament and, in 2003 he won the AICA Prize, Lisbon.