Jose dos Santos

The first show at the new Callan Park Gallery is José dos Santos. SCA has an informative article on this interesting artist who called himself “the greatest sculptor of Portugal”.

Thanks to Peter Fay, local collector and curator, almost all of dos Santos’ surviving work has been relocated to Sydney, and is now held by the University of Sydney. The show at Callan Park is just some of this collection – carefully restored and exhibited in simple, white rooms of which I’m sure dos Santos would have approved. He evidently lived a simple life, being able neither to read nor write (nor sleep, in old age) – in a small-holding in the village of Arega, Portugal (1904 – 1996).

A devout Christian, he was said to have received the stigmata, and the richness of the Roman Catholicism of Portugal comes through in these works. There’s an earthy magical mystery about this faith (one that certainly impressed itself upon me in my travels in Northern Portugal in the 1980s) and in these works there’s sexuality which isn’t really just that – it’s Eros, the generative principle, embodied and earthy and living within the faith. Many of the pieces have both male and female genitals – under the flowing layers of clothing (that actually came from the inhabitants of Arega) designed to avoid embarrassing the local women.

In the store room are lots of other interesting works deemed not yet ready or not appropriate for display [update, 10 Apr 09: Colin Rhodes says in his comment below that this is not the case - thanks Colin], and below are a couple of these – energetic little demons and part human/animals, rocking away out there, emanating from a personal creative world completely isolated from the contemporary trends of European modernism.

(It’s interesting to me that dos Santos wanted to be remembered as a fadista, a singer of the fado, the plaintive, semitic sound of Portugal, rather than as a sculptor.)

As John McDonald said about dos Santos, in his review of last year’s show Without Borders: Outsider Art In An Antipodean Context at the Campbelltown Arts Centre:

Yet for a truly eye-catching exhibitor it is hard to go past Jose Dos Santos, a Portuguese peasant who claimed that God had told him how to release forms hidden in hunks of wood. Whatever God said seems to have been a huge turn-on, because dos Santos’s sculptures are as hyper-sexualised as any African fertility fetish. He was divinely inspired when it came to finding a place for that last piece of timber.

Finally here’s a magnificent hermaphrodite – proudly holding centre stage in the gallery. Her/his breasts are definitely a central subject of interest for the artist – as they are in several others of the works (in fact, clothing is at times cut to reveal and draw attention to breasts). Dos Santos was said to hold women in high regard, in distinct contrast to his view of men.

And here’s a great article by Hugh Adams one of the “discovers” of dos Santos, about the man himself, about outsider art and about art collecting in general.

Tagged as: Art, Callan Park Gallery, Jose dos Santos, Outsiders

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