SEBASTIÃO CASTELO LOPES
Lisbon, Portugal, 1994
With both an artistic and academic career centered on Drawing, Sebastião Castelo Lopes articulates line and word in a work of remarkable poetic force, where an intertextuality game sows – leaving the viewer to collect – references to universes of writers that go from Baudelaire to Jaime Gil de Biedma, Adília Lopes, Mariangela Gualtieri, Miguel Cardoso or John Steinbeck, among others. This virtually endless process of doing, undoing, redoing and over doing, in black and white, a line, a mark, a clue, a word, is stated by Sebastião ever since “Work’s Words”, his visual poem and artistic manifesto from 2016. His drawings expand occasionally to a third dimension, gaining prominence – “stepping out” from the page – in minimal elements that accentuate the characteristics of installation, experimentation, reading, appropriation and play to which his work invites.
Winner of the Millennium BCP Foundation Acquisition Award in the 2019 edition of Drawing Room Lisboa, his work is represented in other private and public collections, such as the Budapesti Torténeti Múzeum.