Joaquim Rodrigo

Joaquim Rodrigo, originally uploaded by mister anchovy.

We visited several museums in the Lisbon area, including a show from the fabulous Berardo Collection at the Contemporary Art Museum in Sintra. At a certain point we realized we that we were gravitating toward the work of a painter we knew nothing about, named Joaquim Rodrigo. Rodrigo was a self-taught painter who worked between about 1940 and 1990. His paintings on the one hand remind me of the work of the American modernist Stuart Davis, but on the other hand, they are remarkably personal works, complex, poetic, and seemingly very simple. More information about Rodrigo can be found in the book Joaquim Rodrigo Time and Inscription, by Pedro Lapa, published by the Museu do Chiado in Lisboa.