If, in the 80s, Manuel Carmo’s works offered symbolic landscapes touched by a dream-like imagination which
allowed him to be situated in what Cirlot calls “Informalism”, currently, the symbolic component is mainly
concentrated into formal propositions of a geometric nature: straight and curved lines, angular areas, masses
and blocks of great polymorphic simplicity, which interact freely in spaces dominated by light backgrounds as if
they were collages.
Some touches of colour participate in this symbolic game dominated by the dialogue of black-white and reflect
what has already been established amongst the different isolated elements that participate in the space of each work.
Joan-Lluis de Yebra
Professor at the Barcelona University’s College of Fine Arts
In Manuel Carmo’s work, the lines are gloriously balanced to offer harmony in accordance with the project.The
method and origin of conceiving the figures offer a solid and rectilinear consistency: an evocative continent,
handled according to this perspective, according to the idea, through invisible strings that manipulate progressive
and dynamic puppets, offered in a suggestive, sensual, nude and simple form.
The author affords us an attractive new interpretation of living nature in its maximum generative expression.
Antonio Sánchez-Bravo
President of UNESCO’s Spanish Commission
The works of Manuel Carmo when analysed by the decomposition of their constitutive elements always narrate
a story that moves within the four corners of the canvas. Only the symbols of the story are visible. Without
annulling it, they hide it, but because of their nature as symbols they simultaneously confer it with a wider
meaning.
The large gestural outlines, the columns that both nurture and support, the lines that transmit the truth to their
canvasses or the triptych punctuations that confer strength and beauty are far from configuring cathartic/ catársicos geometrics, on the contrary, they indicate the way to an architectural reading that we must leaf
through as if it were a book.
Fernando Tavares Rodrigues
Writer and University Professor
Making minimalist grammar territorial, Manuel Carmo appropriates the image, purifies it and transforms it into
signs through evanescent gestural graphics of lyrical abstraction. He creates a new universe of recognition
between the intellectual and emotional, like the architect who finds in painting the form of expression, he is the
man who acts as catalyst to space in all its energy and irreverence, paradoxically expressed not by the sign
of geometric precision but by the marking/tearing, before our very eyes, of the body/sphere where all spheres
of all private cults are annexed.
Fascinated by space, he paints architecture in its abstract geometry.
Architecture with the rhythms of voids that rehearse movements that have already been shaped in Piet Mondrian’s
neo-plasticism, where harmony is conditioned to the application of rigorously abstract and geometric linear forms,
not through linear orthogonality, but rather through its organic/gesturality and the monochromatic treatment of
surfaces. In contrast, however, the architectural spatiality of Manuel Carmo, although it uses a balance of
equivalence, where beauty is defined the articulation of the horizontal and vertical undulating lines, it is here rather
more evolving, recreating a new figurative universe.
Júlio Quaresma
Art critic
Manuel Carmo suggests landscape values, a purified nature in a plastic and poetic synthesis of its substances,
animated by the counterpoint of the elements of a minimalist language.
António Prates
Gallerist
Manuel do Carmo represents a new minimalism, possibly more lyrical than conceptual. A painting that treads
lonely trails, removing, here and there, influences, but remaining, overall rebellious to the point of not conforming
to movements or groups where it would be spent.
José Eduardo de Almeida e Silva
Art Manager
In a purified language, the artist plastically reinvents the geometric tear, associating to it fragments of uniform
colour, similar to the manner of collages, that work asan emotional substrate to pictorial space.
Recurring to a
rigorous methodology of constructive features – in fact in line with his sculpture “A Janela” installed at the Tra-
vessa dos Inglesinhos, in Bairro Alto, Lisbon – Manuel Carmo achieves, through extremely synthetic geometries,
a considerable experience of the symbol.
The rhythms that the straight and curved lines create on the canvas and their counterpoint with the chromatic
backgrounds establish an essentialist solar poetic.
José Sousa Machado
Art Critic
A brief comment on the circumstance of Manuel Carmo being frequently introduced as a minimalist painter; a
label we do not agree with because we consider his style to be mostly supremacist especially since his huge
conceptual vitality corresponds to geometry, in his irregular case, of forms and of the scarce range of colours
the artist uses in the aesthetic treatment of his work of non-objective representation where he interprets the
“supremacy of pure feeling” of the abstract, as conceived in Kasimir Malevich’s manifesto.
Joăo Silvério Pires
Art critic
Manuel Carmo allows what is born in the deepest intimacy of his thought to transpire, the result of a life matured
by meditation. The manipulation of the materials and the technique he has developed over several years render
his paintings instantly recognisable.
Rámon Catalan
Artist
The creative act of Manuel Carmo’s drawing integrate a gestalt globality that transposes space-time, where the
symbol open up the doors of recognition, penetration or revelation of a knowledge and spiritual truth of the cosmic
mystery of life which the artist seeks in the silence of the human soul.
Diva Morazzo
Master in Art History
Manuel Carmo’s serenity hides a singular battle since the forces of Nature are summoned onto the canvas to
join the battle of earthly values affect matter and are transcribed here by the large horizontal lines against spiritual
values, registered by vertical lines. This dichotomy results in the transformation of matter into an ineffable reality, sublimely made Painting.
Paulo Morais Alexandre
University Art History Professor
Manuel Carmo’s drawing mobilises the reader: it imposes rupture from expectation; perpetuates an instant;
re-invents the syntax of emotion in each painting-poem.
Regina de Castro e Abreu
Professor and writer
Manuel Carmo tells stories in an apparently tangible form through his minimalist art of absolute dispossession:
in a purifying cleansing or in the purity of cleansing final before the infinite.
In the absolute simplicity of his whole paintings that speak only one colour, three points remain, each one,
occupying a different place, like a nuclear mark of the conception of life or as the new trinity.
Colour is the voice of the spirit, of magic, of mystery and of the imaginary.
Margarida Ruas
Director of the Water Museum
Manuel Carmo presents a set of works of absolute and precise linearity where gesturalism duals up with the
geometric reflecting emotional and spiritual human nature in counterpoint to the intellectualism and rationalism
of the world we live in.
Paulo Alarcăo
Gallerist
Many, many people have written about Manuel Carmo’s absolutely contemporary painting. I feel in that
minimalism of lines and colour a post Mondrian geometry laden with disturbing symbolisms.
Inęs Bustorff
Journalist
