Álvaro Siza (Matosinhos, Portugal, 1933) inhabits a kind of imaginary museum, where he draws himself in a continuous exercise of (re)creation and poetic unfolding. A universe close to architecture, but more intimate, simultaneously luminous and sometimes painful, in the inevitable contamination with that of his wife, Maria Antónia Siza, whose premature death in 1973 seems to have been sublimated in the angels that his hand incessantly summons on paper.

The artist seeks to reconcile fragments of his own personal history in a global vision—weltanschauung—, just as the architect attempts to repair the fractured body of the city through the ancient philosophy of kintsugi. It is not by chance that this collection of works begins in 1979, coinciding with the beginning of his international career in Berlin, a city deeply divided by war.

This section begins, however allegorically, in the Jurassic period, with Siza emerging from the primordial soup of our ancestors on the back of a brachiosaurus. The familiar geography of the drawing evokes the mountainous landscape that can be glimpsed from the fenêtre en longueur at the Church of Santa Maria, in Marco de Canaveses, site where the forest gave rise to architecture itself: from the first man and woman to a scene of the Nativity, where David’s messianic prophecy is transfigured by Le Corbusier’s biblical knowledge.

Celebrating the thirtieth anniversary of the Church of Santa Maria’s consecration, commissioned by the then priest, Nuno Higino, the exhibition reflects on the gift of knowledge through drawing. In Greek mythology, knowledge was the gift given to humanity by Prometheus, the titan who stole fire from the gods and was saved by Chiron’s sacrifice of his immortality. Chiron, in turn, had been transformed into a horse by his father, Cronos, which is why centauromachy, the abduction of Dejanira by Nessus, and even bullfighting became themes that Siza adopted from Picasso, whose engravings he contemplates every day before falling asleep.

The eyes then become fragments of infinity and fleeting shadows of a dream: ‘I closed my eyes, scribbled without looking at the paper, only feeling the groove—ink spilling over into form.’ The spilling of the form enables a process of purification that became even more refined when Álvaro Siza broke his arm. The lines are transformed into rapid narratives, where movement and rhythm are synthesised in an almost sculptural way. Siza’s passion for sculpture is no secret, ever since his father convinced him to pursue architecture in 1948, when they visited Gaudí’s works on family trips to Spain. Perhaps that is why he draws as if he were sculpting and sculpts as if he were building architecture.

This exhibition, curated by the Director of Architecture, António Choupina, is part of the Serralves Collection’s Itinerant Exhibitions Programme, which aims to make the Foundation’s collection accessible to diverse audiences across all regions of the country.

Production: Fundação de Serralves — Museu de Arte Contemporânea, Porto