Interview with Domingos Júnior

From Clandestine Activist to Visual Artist

Interview with Domingos Júnior

by Alexandre Coxo, 17 October 2020

Domingos Júnior was born in Mozambique in 1950. There he attended the Art group led by the painter António Quadros between 1964 and 1968. He graduated in Architecture from ESAP.

He taught Art Education in primary school (years 5-6). At ESAP he taught on the Architecture course, and at UTAD on courses for nursery teachers, primary school teachers, Landscape Architecture and Environmental Engineering. He also practised architecture in companies and in his own studio.

He currently works as a visual artist, curator and organiser of cultural activities, which he has done since 1993.

In this interview, Domingos gives us the chance to learn what anti-fascist political activity was like and the role art played at the time. He also talks about his influences, how he sees the art market and his most recent works.

How did your interest in the visual arts begin?
My contact with the arts began under the supervision of António Quadros, who opened up horizons in that field. For the first time I came into contact with art and culture, from understanding painting and sculpture to cinema and photography… that is where my interest in the arts took shape. All in four consecutive years of aesthetic practice with him in Mozambique.

What interests or motivates you most in making art?
First of all, producing culture: I am interested in making artefacts that carry interesting subjects, from which certain values and issues that motivate me can be questioned or raised. On the other hand, for me it is also a playful activity. Drawing and painting have always been deeply playful things that I like doing, experimenting, handling materials, and so I combine the enjoyable with communication.

Before becoming an architect you were involved in political activity. Do those experiences relate to what you understand by art?
Of course, because every political attitude we have is reflected in what we do, whether it is art or not. When I make art I cannot help reflecting and including in my works all the values I fight for in politics. But not in a propagandistic or fundamentalist way.

Have you ever made a work that is explicitly political?
No, I do not think art has to be propaganda, unless that is exactly its intention, and in that sense I have done it. I was once asked for a poster to celebrate the 25th of April, and I made a poster with certain stereotypes which, though drawn in a non-stereotyped way, had to be represented: peace, the colonial war, the dove, the carnations… the usual symbols. Not necessarily, but at the time I felt it had to be that way.
As an activity in itself, art does not necessarily have to be propaganda. Nor do I deny that it can be. I know many artists who are, explicitly so: for example, all the artists working in the context of socialist realism are explicit in the propaganda of what they do, not least because they have a very rigid brief to meet. And that does not make some of them lesser artists. Before the advent of Nazism there were artists who made brilliant works denouncing the horrors to come, such as Grosz.
I do not rule this kind of thing out, but at the moment I see no need to turn my work into a pamphlet or another means of propaganda. The ideas are embodied there, but subtly. Sometimes so subtly that I am aware people may not understand. For example, I made a series in coloured pencil based on something that looked abstract, because at that scale you could not tell that the references were images of viruses, bacteria and so on. They were images manipulated from the 10 deadliest micro-organisms of the time, precisely to illustrate the metaphor of something very beautiful and angelic whose image lies. Deep down, what was depicted was not beautiful at all. What I wanted to discuss was the image, which can be very beautiful but can hide very bad things and therefore promote very bad things.

Do you think it still makes sense to talk about the democratisation of art today?
I think it always makes sense to talk about the democratisation of art. I do not mean it in the sense people sometimes understand, that we should all be equally able to make and understand art. One thing we learned early on is that neither Art, nor Science, nor Culture belongs to common sense, although there is someone who tries to discuss this, Sousa Ventura, "what is common sense in science and culture"; even so, it is his project, an interesting one, but I do not believe it is possible. I believe it is possible to bring as many people as possible into contact with art from an early age, so that they can deal with it more comfortably than they would if they felt uneasy in the presence of an artistic object. Contact with culture should be a compulsory part of education. I do not mean only the visual arts, but all of them: music, theatre, etc. A country is all the richer in civic terms the more contact it has with culture.

Does art have a teaching role?
In a way it does, but not a direct one. Art on its own teaches nobody anything. It only teaches if people want to learn; in other words, learning through art does not depend on the artist but on the person engaging with the art. In that respect I am entirely in line with Umberto Eco in The Open Work, and with all the theories that say that when you read a novel you have a silent reading that is never the same as someone else's reading of the same novel. The blonde you see in the novel is not the blonde the other person sees. The same happens with visual art: I said earlier that I drew the deadliest viruses, and that does not mean others see the same thing. It was very funny that the person who bought one of the pieces said she did not care that they were viruses, because she saw water lilies in a pond. We may have very good intentions, but then everyone takes from them what they want. And good intentions...

"I do not think art has to be propaganda, unless that is exactly its intention, and in that sense I have done it."

Title: 3º das NATUREZAS MORTA(I)S (3rd of the Dead/Deadly Natures)
Materials: coloured pencil on paper
Dimensions: 100cm x 70cm

When you took part in political activity, how were the visual arts used?
Art served the propaganda of the political forces opposing the regime through posters. Murals less so, because they took a long time and doing them in daylight was unthinkable. There was graffiti with very short protest slogans that were quick to do, first with a brush and a bucket, then with spray paint, which was even quicker, left a mark and took time to clean. Then there was a clandestine press produced with rudimentary means, manual reproduction based on stencils; texts were handwritten or typed, later on electric typewriters. Reproduction was manual, then with spirit duplicators and, in a final phase, electronic duplicators. Stencils and rudimentary forms of propaganda prevailed, especially in the smaller parties. In the PCP [Portuguese Communist Party] they sometimes managed to get some kind of images, such as prints made with linocut or woodcut rollers, into Avante!, which was also clandestine. They were always rudimentary means that could fit inside a home and be hidden at any moment so the house looked normal. Usually couples even lived there to disguise it further and appear normal. For example, Dias Coelho went to live with Margarida Tengarrinha, his wife, to turn the house into a clandestine print shop. The PCP had many visual artists; elsewhere artists served every purpose. For example, I recently found out that for the PCP(ML), Pacheco Pereira's party, a colleague of mine, Maria José Abrunhosa, then studying architecture a year ahead of me, did the drawings for the party press.
They were usually very linear drawings because they were adapted to the printing method. In Grito do Povo, which belonged to my party, the PCPR, especially the student wing, I know Isabel Lanho did most of the illustrations. I do not know whether there were more illustrators elsewhere; I never met them. After the 25th of April I met an architect who did caricatures for Grito do Povo, but by then it was something else, with other means.
The main function of the images was propaganda: an illustration was created to go with the texts being written. There were not many images, and the aim was to make the publication look richer and more appealing. People thought images were attractive and, in a way, educational.
Nobody discussed audiences the way we do now. In the political parties, the target audience for leaflets aimed at students was the student body, and for leaflets aimed at the working class and the people it was the general population we wanted to reach. People then received them clandestinely in their letterboxes and read them or not. Or we would turn up at a factory gate and hand them out; handing them out person to person came more after the 25th of April, as I did many times in Lisbon, and we would even talk to people and discuss politics and so on.
The illustration was essentially realist, but a primitive realism, because drawing for these processes is difficult, as they were rudimentary. It illustrated the idea that the proletariat had to take power, that the people had to come to power, that a revolution was needed. Basically, that was it.
There were also symbolic illustrations, such as the hammer and sickle, and the leaders of communism - Marx, Engels, Stalin, Mao Zedong... and little else. These illustrations were only meant to be another way of enriching the writing, on the assumption that the target audiences would respond to them.
They were not artistically eloquent images.
At the same time there were artists who were in the opposition. Of course there were artists who supported the regime, but from a certain point the vast majority of artists and intellectuals were in the opposition. It was hard to find anyone clearly in favour of Nazism and fascism, which does not mean they all shared the same ideology. Just look at all the neo-realist painters and you see that their work was clearly an apology for defending the people and against the suffering they endured. Júlio Pomar, Cipriano, Dias Coelho and many more used painting critically. There the tools really were those of painting, the weapons of the academy. It was like the song that becomes a weapon of protest. Poetry too, etc. But here the art is more erudite and subtle, when not metaphorical in its messages.
In the clandestine press what there was, unintentionally, was a conservative way of doing propaganda, even though people thought it was the most direct way to reach people. In a way it was very conservative because the language was very simplistic and very reductive in its message. Even so, to make this kind of thing they called on visual artists, fine art people, because they had the tools and the skill to do it.

As an architect, did you have the chance to practise architecture as an artistic expression?
Architecture is always an artistic expression, and at the same time a pragmatic and functional, technical and scientific one. When we do architecture we cannot detach ourselves from either side.
In other words, when you take on a project you know clearly that there are at least three aspects to consider: the financial, the material/technical and the expressive. They all shape the choices about what can be done.
There is another factor architects should consider, the sociological one, although it is extremely complex and difficult. Today I do not believe most architects have the ability or awareness of how they are intervening and what city they are making, that is, what kind of society they are creating. I will never forget a man called Dr Geraldo Coelho Dias telling me, "You are an architect, so you are condemned to do God's work". I replied, "Thank God, I still cannot tell what God wants, so I do what I can and what I think best". I understood his idea, in the sense that the architect shapes the way others will live. That is not entirely true, because the architect is often no more than an intermediary for what others want to do, unless he refuses to do it… but someone else will. And that is not right.

Are the references of architecture your influences in visual art?
No, at least not directly and immediately. I am a bit like Le Corbusier, who said painting is painting and architecture is architecture. Of course aesthetic concepts in general, notions of taste, are implicit in my work. There is no escaping it: we cannot have one taste, one aesthetic and visual training for designing a building and another for painting. Of course we are talking about different things, so they seem completely autonomous, but they never are. Intellectually they never are; practically they may be.

Do you see painting as a space for personal expression?
Human activity is always personal and involves a great deal of effort. When you have to make a painting, you have to think it through, prepare, make sketches, the plan; you have to know what you want to do. With a building it is the same: I would make mountains of sketches to design a door, a stair rail or a window profile. It is this side that many say is painful, which I enjoy very much but which obviously takes a lot of work. It is not something intimate, as people sometimes think. It is an intellectual function, and it takes work.

Is that suffering the biggest challenge you face as a creator?
No, the biggest challenge is making things that are worthwhile and that others say really are worthwhile. Otherwise we are just doing occupational therapy.

"it always makes sense to talk about the democratisation of art"

Title: Cântico dos Cânticos (Song of Songs)
Materials: Indian ink on paper
Dimensions: 100cm x 100cm

How do you see today's art market?
Like any market. Art does not escape the rules of other markets. We live in a capitalist system; works are goods and go through the same processes as any other goods. It is a luxury item, always sold according to the range of products consumers can buy or are interested in buying. That is how it is sold and circulates, and for that very reason it generates an economy. Many people make money from it: auctioneers, gallerists, curators, artists, museums. Indeed, contrary to what many think, art generates economic activity. A country that respects art and culture is also respecting economic development. Unfortunately, most politicians do not see it that way; while they see tourism that way and open museums to attract tourists, they have not yet realised that culture has to come first, because it generates an economic circuit involving many people, many processes and money. When I say culture I mean it in general, like football, which involves fortunes. If Serralves has many visitors today, and banks back exhibitions that draw more than ten thousand visitors, it is because that audience was created. That audience was created in schools, through the educational projects run together with Serralves. More and more people are interested in these cultural phenomena, so culture generates wealth, but not only that.

Has the way people see art changed since you studied at Fine Arts?
Of course, and significantly, for two reasons. At the time only 2% of the population had access to higher education; the vast majority had only four years of schooling, poverty was widespread, the rural world lived from subsistence farming and was extremely conservative and submissive to every dominant power, the working class lived in dreadful conditions, the worst imaginable, there was massive emigration because there was hunger and no work, and the universities were blind, with an orthodox, rigid teaching completely closed to anything new. Culture was very limited and closed, there were very few elites and little contact with other countries. Portugal was completely closed and inward-looking. Art was aimed at a very small, restricted and conservative group of people who had the financial means to move in those circles. Anything outside that was looked at askance, when it was looked at at all, and rejected by the regime. On top of that, there were very few artists. The art world was very small and restricted. The 25th of April brought mass education and the democratisation of education, which brought a different intellectual awareness, like it or not; however much people criticise that young people learn a lot but know nothing, it is not true. Most young people today are more aware than at the time, better informed and more open to the world and the things of the world. It may not immediately translate into active civic awareness, but it does translate into a different view of the world. Today there are always audiences at art events; back then there were simply none. Young people today are much more aware of the importance of contact with culture, and more people are producing culture. Suffice to say there are tens of thousands of visual artists in Portugal. When we criticise today's situation, and there are serious reasons to criticise it, we must remember. We are not where we were: Salazarism was the most stifling and terrible thing imaginable. There were people who came to the city to work as servants because at home the custom was to share three sardines with dry bread among the family once a day. Today you have a kind of organisation and solidarity that did not exist before, and what did exist was in hiding.
There have been many positives, but even after 50 years there are still many habits from the past.

Can you give an example in the arts?
In the arts, just as back then, the arts are organised as lobbies. People live very much on the basis of who they know, cronyism, lobbying, and that is where the systems for validating work are created. I think that is profoundly wrong and should not be so. I know these systems reflect how society itself is organised, but cultural circles were supposed to play an active role in trying to change this kind of situation. I am not asking intellectuals to work miracles in this respect. In fact, I do not believe in mythologising art, or intellectuals as the people who will save the world, but they do have a role: to become a critical mass that reflects on these phenomena and does not allow too much stagnation. In the arts, I think there is a great deal of stagnation at the moment. In Portugal there is a tendency to accept lobbies far too easily, at both national and local level. Just look at how Portuguese artists gain recognition when they go international, because they are people not tied to a single centre or lobby and have a great deal of independence.

Is that why there are no state artists?
No, and funnily enough, in that respect it is even worse. Like it or not, the State should have a role in supporting the arts; not supporting artists, but supporting the arts by fostering a set of initiatives, through the budget and otherwise, promoting the democratisation of culture, access to culture and the production of cultural goods, etc. None of this is done systematically and in an organised way yet. Just look at local councils: they want to have artists but do not want to pay them. They hold cultural forums that end up serving no purpose. They neither foster culture nor circulate the cultural goods that the State itself should acquire. That is why there are museums. Under Salazar, despite the dire poverty, culture was the regime's dress coat, so it acquired some cultural goods to show that the regime had dignity… art served as propaganda. In all these matters there is still a big step to take, in realising that culture is not only an economic good but a good that the State should promote, support and in a way sustain. Museums are not there to hold the same old works. I am not saying the State should be a luxury State, but it should be the founder of our culture.

What attracts you most in contemporary art?
Its ability to give me or create contact with objects and expressions that, in a way, show the concerns of our time, playfully or aesthetically. Brecht said that every people has the theatre it deserves, and that theatre is mainly for entertainment. I am interested in the playful side. I like seeing beautiful things; many people will say that is nonsense, but it is not.
Although there are ugly things that interest me because they are part of art. Indeed, they made up a large part of modern art, which was used as a weapon against certain powers.
I am also interested in its provocative and critical side about the times.

"the arts are organised as lobbies. People live very much on the basis of who they know, cronyism,... that is where they create the systems for validating work."

View of the exhibition "Água" (Water)
Porto Order of Architects, 2017

In your work, which subjects and materials do you most like to use? And how do they relate to your ideology?
I use practically every kind of material, from coloured pencil and Indian ink to gouache and oil… above all I like experimenting with materials. The support I favour is paper. That does not mean I do not work on others, but paper seduces me much more.
The subjects have revolved around social issues that concern me, particularly social issues linked to art. To what extent can or must art say something to people without being moralistic, propagandistic or fundamentalist about anything, but in some way question someone?
One thing always interests me in art: exploring the paths of aesthetics. To what extent the image can be manipulated, how far it can be manipulated and what results that manipulation brings are always issues that interest me. It goes without saying that ideological questions and my social and political stance are always present. I do not think anyone makes choices outside their way of being. They are always very considered choices; apart from experimental situations, I make a project in which I research and study what I want to do. I keep working on and correcting the images I am producing, and in the end, even so, the project often does not turn out exactly as planned. Precisely because the question of how the idea is being thought through and communicated is always as important to me as how it is made.
For example: when I did the coloured pencil drawings, I started… 2012/2013… some apparently abstract drawings of things that did not look realistic. I used Indian ink because I had used it all my life as an architect and thought it made sense to use it in another context. The ink drawings came from research into the microscopic animal world, which makes up most living beings and without which we would not exist. People looked at the works and saw unreal things. I called them "Gardens". Gardens are a way of "culturalising" (that word does not exist… manipulating) nature, manipulating it culturally and ideologically. For me they were dreamlike, fantastic gardens, but they were based on those single-celled microscopic beings that multiply and, from a certain point, are imagined by me. When people looked at them they said: "why are they gardens?"… they did not connect them directly with nature; the image was extremely ambiguous. I remember someone commenting "these drawings of guts are fun" - that is what they saw, and everyone saw their own thing.
Basically, the choice of materials in almost all my exhibitions has to do with having been a teacher. I felt there is a tendency to undervalue the kind of materials children use, or materials that are not considered art because they are not as expressive or noble as others. It was also an issue in architecture. I worked with the materials kids use, but in a way that we adults can.
After the coloured pencil works, I was invited to another exhibition and made a series of collages. I prepared the papers myself with the primary colours, white and black, the basic colours explained to children in an introduction to colour theory, from which all other colours can be obtained. The collages were based on themes from the Old Testament, because we are brought up in that Judeo-Christian tradition and its themes are still very powerful for people today. Some things we only understand when we confront them with other cultures and start decoding them. I looked at these things somewhat critically, though. Original sin, the fall of the angels - basically I do not believe in any of it, so I criticised God, the God who is to blame for all this. If he created these things, he is the one to blame. The others, after all, are limited. Then I took subjects from the New Testament that were already in the Old, such as the Tower of Babel. Basically, what I want to question is my deep belief as an atheist, even though I have a Judeo-Christian upbringing and cannot escape it. If there is a God, then God is to blame, and from then on there is no point worrying about anything else. That idea is a convenient excuse, even for murder. The whole exhibition was based on that.

Are you working on anything new? Do you have an exhibition planned?
Yes, it came about precisely during lockdown. On the one hand everyone was talking about doing exhibitions about the virus, which I did not feel like doing; on the other, I could not go out and buy materials. So I decided to work from some Japanese-style (concertina) Moleskine notebooks I had. I had already worked on them horizontally, and now I decided to work vertically. On a trip to the village I had seen nature bursting out, so many flowers and so much colour in the fields, and in the garden here at home too - the birds did not even move away. I felt I had to talk about nature coming out of lockdown. First in some watercolours… I thought I should see the good side: nature has no morals, but as we were shut indoors for fifteen days, nature seized the moment.
As I had more notebooks, and working vertically called for a different approach to composition, I decided to experiment. From there, based on elements of nature, I started producing more.
At the moment I have a series of vertical strips, so to speak, linked to this notion of what nature is. Each strip uses different materials, though that does not make the pieces all that experimental. The theme runs through them all: painting/drawing with every kind of material, from watercolour and Indian ink to coloured pencil... Of course there is some criticism in it. I love nature and like being in natural surroundings, but it is not this playful side that interests me. Basically, what is nature coming out of lockdown if not a criticism of ourselves? What are roots upon roots intertwined if not an allusion to what we are? Without a tradition that builds humanity, we are very poor, in a way living in a state of barbarism. Barbarism is only possible when we are unaware of how we were built as humans and of the consequences of everything that made our history. It was all done at the cost of blood, and it would be good if not much more had to flow. The day will come when barbarism ends, when society stops being built at the cost of blood and starts being built at the cost of something else. It is a utopia, but at least I have that belief.
This also leads me to something else, the tradition of landscape painting. Landscape has above all a symbolic value, clearly so in the Romantics. Landscape speaks of other things, of faith and belief in God, with Caspar David Friedrich. In Constable and Turner too. Always marked by a utopian construction. People may see some strips with very pretty little plants, but that is where the project comes from. I do not have a date to exhibit yet; I will not do it this year, probably only once this virus business is resolved.

For someone who wants to buy a work by a contemporary artist, what should they bear in mind to choose the best piece?
If you can buy, buy what you like. Apart from people who buy with a view to making money, I think people should buy what they can afford within what they like. When I buy things for my home, I choose from what I like, or I do not buy because I do not have the money. When I buy music, I choose what I like; if I like a print for the wall, I buy it for the same reason. Or because I found it amusing or fun - I think that is the advice. Major collectors do not need my advice at all; they already have people to guide them.

Finally: what should the role of visual artists be today?
Today we live in a totally plural society - that is what we call democracy - and inevitably the visual artist's role is plural. For me, fortunately, there is no escaping that.
I would not want to live in a dictatorial society where there was only one kind of art.