«Orlando Pompeu is a painter leaded by the instinct, formed in experimentation academies of "making" and" knowing to make". Among Fafe and Porto, Paris, London, Tokyo, Rio de Janeiro and Barcelona, San Francisco and New York, Orlando Pompeu proceed as long as a passage of almost thirty years. From an initial hiper-realist language to became later, as an abstract one, passing to a permanent and gradual dialogue between the figuration and the abstraction, in perfect harmony with the ideas of the artist. They are revelations of an unlimited creative imagination put in a very emotive register. They are an incessant search of new forms, poetical conceptions of drawing, movement, colours, symbolisms, and a setting of the space and the time through a great liberty of expression.

The theme of this exhibition seats in a speech that the artist has been exploring for the last years, such as the poetics of a people in homesickness, feeling ambivalence between the desire of the departure or of return. This can be explained by the renewed Orlando Pompeu passion for the City of the Lights’ allure that take him to travel in work and the enormous desire of return to his origins and to his family, to a privacy world. He transposes this human truth into the gauze through graphical and spontaneous elements, of great aesthetic beauty or through a more elaborated conceptual and geometric source. The two kinds of painting coexist in the painter’s work, even though individually, in a harmonious way, therefore both express life through a simple look. »

Liliana Figueiredo Pereira

Porto, May of 2005

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"Essences of a Cause

Originary of Cepães, in municipality of Fafe, Orlando Pompeu has come to renew, one and another time, through his painting work, the search and the meeting in his experiences and memories, of an originary place for all the painting.

The gauzes of Orlando Pompeu make us to submerge us in the blue dominants, in the light roses and in the tones like sand, place where the time, the sunlight, the sea horizon and the Woman inhabit. Place of fluttering seagulls, small boats, surrealist rocks and colourful balloons. The sea that bathes the North coast is enlarged in his pictures and we can feel water that does not have an end... premeditation of future works? Nevertheless, Orlando Pompeu is, above all, a painter of the people. In his paintings, we can always find real men and real women, pictures of his multiple experiences, even most of the times they can appear in a transfigured plan. In the painting “Precocious Diagnostic of Sexual Pathology" he represents the world of the unlimited sexuality. Because his painting is real, true, an extension of the life knowledge. In addition, in his gauzes, he painted always women, because he admires them a lot. In this exhibition, he presents some pictures of the familiar universe.

Once more Orlando Pompeu surprises at this new Exhibition. He surprises for the artistic quality that his paintings discloses. In the sequence of "pompeuano" thematic nucleus, his work presents the object and the body as clear references. Pompeu does not renounce to the object that it is always the excuse in his painting, and mainly dimensioned in the scope of a deliberate and extremely rigorous formal organization. The colour-form relation is preponderant evidence. To represent constitutes a univocal direction in his work. When he uses the expression of the gesture in the representation, Pompeu looks over a way, he develops a process that goes for the abstraction direction.

In some of the present paintings in this Exhibition, Pompeu assumes the object as a kind of visible splitting in the giraffes painting, and as a formal distortion present in a familiar picture. With this new series, he looks for testing and to demonstrating clearly the unlimited potentialities of the pictorial representation of the object. However, he does it in a way that each painting is a rare work. Each one of these new conceptual paintings, either the ones that extend as a whole proper figurative language, inaugurated by the artist by the end of the 80s, or the ones that seem to evidence at this present moment, new concerns to the level of the conception and representation of the object. They translate the evolution of the artistic path and the solidity of Orlando Pompeu’s painting. His plastic work organizes itself by an autonomous system with proper structural laws. It is in the structural relations between the object and the subject that it is established the vital impulse and the creative evolution that the Pompeu´s work suggests. That one presents values of high artistic responsibility in the technician, formal and creative levels.

Pompeu is also an artist worried about the understanding of his painting. He is an internationally recognized painter with a career of almost thirty years. He continues looking for an idea of work and detail, of attention and the learning of the look.

As some of the most appraised contemporary Portuguese artists, Pompeu does what and how he wants, placing himself closer than the artisan than other painters. His way to see things adjusts to what he paints. In that direction, his painting registers truth, perhaps the essence of his cause.

His paintings radiate light and hope in the turbulent world in which we live. Thank you, Orlando Pompeu!»

Liliana Figueiredo Pereira

Porto, November of 2005

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«Orlando Pompeu: L´Age D´Or

Orlando Pompeu’s Art Exhibition with selected works of art that represents twenty-eight years of his national and international artistic career and his fiftieth birthday.

Twenty-eight years of career are vital in an artist work. Orlando Pompeu’s work has a well-determined line that shows feelings multiplicity. The work speaks for itself.

Galeria D’ Arte 46 and Sheraton Porto Hotel & SPA wanted to join to this event commemoration.

The works of art shown in this exhibition reflect merely a vision of the artist work.

By this time, the Portuguese Culture reveals once more a prevailing factor of our country’s personality. Orlando Pompeu’s work is exceedingly acknowledged by national and international standard and it is very important on the Portuguese Plastic Art panorama.

The last Orlando Pompeu’s works express objective shapes, geometrical, representations of the named real world, great quantity and explosions of his energy, ways of expressing ideas and concepts, and how Pompeu is a conceptual Art painter!  He bases himself on Nature and Mankind and he catches their sense projecting them in each painting, saying it by images, which he would say by words. He uses admiration, emotion, intensity and gratefulness pictorial expressions. To Orlando Pompeu painting is on its one, also a way of gratefulness to the ones who recognize him and in view of the happy moments so far lived. This life awareness, of his personal life, reflects itself in the up-to-date option that in his arrangements, he wants to get his drawings precise giving an objective and a synthetic form. The drawing contour is precise and the tripling or quadruplicating of the same elements strengthens the intensity of the topic.  A kind of contour virtual dilution is reached through the gradual toning down of the used colours, which are connected with almost organic matters, and interpenetrate and succeed between themselves. As if they get unexpected hues without asking permission to the most conventional palette of nature.

This last Orlando Pompeu’s paintings reflect the full presence of the awareness and drawing that are turned to the conceptual harmony.

They are topics connected with Paris, which was essential on his course, in his formation and his art passion that he assimilated through the several artistic movements reading. Those movements were born in Paris in the first half of the twentieth century. They were Cubism, Fauvism, Futurism and Surrealism. He desired to see Eiffel Tour and Sacré-Coeur, where, behind it, in Place du Thétre, he felt the conclusive call to art. He also felt it by copying several images of DS, called “boca de sapo” once that it has been put on the market the year before his birth, in 1955, in Grand Palais. And in 1978, on his first time in Paris still was a very appreciated car, representing the design, innovation and high technology. The painting “Aquando no Grand Palais” it is a boom of forms, light and colours, following a spectral order that the author considers harmonious. It is a living memory of memories lived with friends and places. It is a tribute where we can see a tripling of form of reference to women, with salmon colours, showing the search of the effects realization nearly sculptural in the painting. The “ O Beijo”, an evocative work of those in love that kiss themselves in any railway station…

But the older works here presented that also have a proper figurative language (begun in the end of the eighties) take the reader - observer’s imaginary to topics or dilemma such as life and death, presence and absence, the origins, Cepães and the artist’s wish on the knowledge of new worlds, cultures and mentalities, Porto, Barcelona, Paris, London, New York and Tokyo, the eroticism, the passion and love, illness, life experiences, balance and exorbitance. Face to this, and by the work coherence seen of his shown work, we would say that the author’s passion for the painting remains untouchable. This exhibition “L’ Age D’Or” is the record of Orlando Pompeu’s life experiences in the four corners of the world having as the central image, his life sustainers: art and family.

Porto, March of 2006

Liliana Figueiredo Pereira

(Tradução: Dra. Sónia Teixeira)