Neorealisms, or the politicization of art in Júlio Pomar

Artist Júlio Pomar (1926-2018) created several of the most relevant paintings in the context of Portuguese neorealism and resistance to fascism. He understood neorealism not as an aesthetic formulary, but as an attitude for building what Bento de Jesus Caraça (mathematician, anti-fascist resistance and member of the Portuguese Communist Party) had called the “integral culture of the individual”, arguing that revolution and freedom were not possible without artistic, literary and political culture. Pomar also produced important engravings and murals, which neorealists defended as the most effective means of conveying political and social content.

His oeuvre took different paths from the mid-1950s onwards, becoming more gestural and, in the late 1960s, more Pop, before venturing into various registers, including drawing, graphic work, and palimpsestic compositions with different elements. However, Pomar never stopped making political art, incorporating it into the formal experimentation he never ceased to practise.

Moving away from a traditional understanding of “neorealism” as a simple and closed historical category, this exhibition proposes a revaluation of different moments and languages in Júlio Pomar’s visual work from the vantage point of the successive politicisations of art. The works in the exhibition resonate with the evergreen urgency of thinking about the role of art in society or art as politics. The curators’ choice aims to reexamine the complexity of such modalities and the enduring variability of the relationship between art and politics over the past half century of contemporary art.

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