José Sasportes The Fine Art of Bareback Painting 2014

Written for the exhibition:
Manuel Amado, The horses/Os cavalos – Museu do Oriente, Lisbon, 2014

"There is, or at least there once existed, a picture of a horse by Apelles. It was painted for a competition in which he sought judgment not from men but from dumb animals. For, seeing that his rivals were getting the upper hand by devious means, he showed the pictures individually to some horses he had brought in, and they neighed only at Apelles' picture. As this frequently happened on subsequent occasions it proved to be a good test of the artist's skill.”
(Pliny the Elder, Natural History, XXXV:95)

The above anecdote, told in the 5th century by Pliny the Elder on one of the chapters of his Natural History he dedicated to the fine arts, illustrated the illusionistic skills of Apelles, the mythical genius of ancient Greek painting, of whom not a single work has survived.
In the following centuries, many artists would excel in the depiction of horses, sometimes with similar realistic intentions, but generally associated with their riders, as symbols of the latter’s power. Such is the case of Paolo Ucello's battle horses, and the bearers of Titian's Charles V and Velazquez's Philip IV, and also Gericault’s chasseur on his rearing steed. But there are also the domesticated horses in Degas' racing pictures, and the most serene stallion in Machado de Castro's equestrian statue of king Dom José I. In the 20th century, the subject continued to interest such painters and sculptors as Picasso, Franz Marc, Balla or De Chirico; however, their horses convey not power, but rather anxiety and frailness, like time-worn statues.
Faced with these more recent images, Apelles' jury of horses would rarely neigh, given that they responded more to the depicted animal's typology than to the quality of the paintings, which had relinquished realistic ambition, though an evolution in taste is conceivable even among the equine population. One thing is certain: Manuel Amado's paintings would cause them to express their perplexity, though I do not know in what manner, because these horses do not belong in any riding school: the animals on these canvases display a mythological aura, like the ones found, I think, in Zeus' heavenly stalls, alongside Pegasus and Bucephalus, the four horses of the Piazza San Marco, the Lusitanian horses on Roman mosaics, the unicorn, Marcus Aurelius' mount and the Trojan Horse.
Actually, these horses inhabit, not a stable, but the painter's studio: they are confined to the canvases, as the last picture in this catalogue well illustrates, but that does not mean they are not restless. They are a new feature in the artist's work, and appear in locations that, while new to them, are familiar to us from other paintings. Over time, Manuel Amado has got us used to geometrically comfortable interiors, deserted train stations, and landscapes uncontaminated by any human presence, that hover between luminous and unsettling. They could be, and indeed often were, described as a kind of "metaphysical painting” that runs contrary to the usual depictions of the city. We were jolted by his theatrical canvases, in which scenes were performed by mannequins/silhouettes, but still there were no humans on stage or in the wings, no pulses beat in them. Now we are faced with a veritable explosion in terms of the presence of living (though yet not human) beings: horses that are nearly always depicted as isolated creatures, as if to reflect Manuel Amado's unique position in Portuguese art.
Here, both architectures and landscapes are represented with precision, but the animals strike us as phantasmagoric and oneiric, as if they had come out of a dream in which contrasting forces in search of direction clash. There is rebelliousness in the black steed, and contradiction in the two horses that set off in opposite directions. These pictures tell no stories, but they invite us to imagine them, to anthropomorphise the meaning of the animals' movements on an equestrian theatre.
Manuel Amado's output is suggestive of serene, constant work. Proof of that can be found in his productive regularity and his taste for organizing series or cycles of paintings, as if to exhaust concepts that had challenged him. But no artistic work can exist without disquiet, without spiritual restlessness, which have become increasingly visible, as his series of now protective, now threatening cut-out angels show. In the present exhibition, it is as if forces that until now had been constricted by architecture have taken on the vitality of these horses, and are ready to unleash themselves.
These are not simple full-body portraits of horses, like the prints that decorate the walls of riding clubhouses: what we have here are beings that have been placed in a setting that confines and nearly disorients them, and which are used by the artist as parable-like reflections on his place in the world. Everything is carefully calculated in the meticulous arrangement of the figures, as could be expected from an artist in full possession of his means, who refuses facile eye-catching effects. Visitors are serenely invited to enter the painting and discover the secrets it contains, which will become also their own.
Almada Negreiros once told me that, during the inauguration ceremony of his frescoes at the Alcantara Maritime Station, a cavalry colonel came to him with a pertinent critical observation about the horse on the right panel of the Nau Catrineta triptych. Indignantly, he stated that he had never seen a horse that looked like that. To this Almada, with characteristic ceremonious irony, retorted: "Your Excellency is perfectly right: it is as the poem says – ‘a white horse/ the likes of which you've never seen’.”
Manuel Amado's horses are scions of this poetic breed.