Carlos Calvet

Portuguese plastic artist, he was born in 1928. He graduated in Architecture from the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Porto and since 1946 he paints like a slowly developed expression, preserving a sense of art as a way of personal meditation. In 1947 his artworks were noticeably cubist and influenced by Braque. From 1950, aware of his vocation as a painter, Calvet begins to pay more attention to the construction, to the game of volumes and to the ambiguity between symbolism and the natural image. After a lyric abstract period (1963-1964), Calvet confronts the spontaneous shapes with the geometric ones (1964-1965). With the redefinition of space, came back the need for the figuration of objects invented in the execution act itself.

First, formless spots which would acquire an unusual presence of unidentifiable objects; then, they became trivial objects, screws, buttons and matchboxes, sided with pop decorativisms. The year of 1966 marks the beginning of the synthesis “metaphysical pop” which characterises all his subsequent work.

Source: Carlos Calvet. In Infopédia Porto: Porto Editora, 2003-2012.
[Consult. 2012-04-04]. http://www.infopedia.pt/$carlos-calvet