THE MAP OF A COUNTRYSIDEJoaquim Bravo’s career began in Évora, where he was born and formed a friendship with Álvaro Lapa, António Charrua and António Palolo. This informed and educated group of artists was very active on the emerging art scene of the sixties, absorbing references that mixed literary and philosophical passion (as is the case of Lapa and Bravo) with a peculiar pictorial sharpness (that can be seen in Charrua’s and Palolo’s works). Joaquim Bravo came up with different formulations over time, but during the eighties and until his death in 1990, drawing stands as the matrix that informs his painting, as well as the field of research that he developed more gradually. There are some aspects that are always present in his work from this period, which covers an enormous spectrum of types. In the first place, a great chromatic simplicity, with a regular use of black and white, establishing fields that stand out against the background. On the other hand, a use of the line, literally like a sewing thread that unites fields, or like an underlining that brings the chromatic fields towards a different logic, almost that of writing. In Joaquim Bravo’s black and white fields there is a memory of a plane, of a map of a territory that spreads out, of a hill, of a subtle rising of land, often of an element that structures a landscape, a road that crosses a field of corn. Or not; everything is strictly abstract, pretending that absolute abstraction exists. Perhaps the tenuous landscape evoked is of the same nature as the frontiers that divide up Piet Mondrian’s chromatic fields, probably also evocative of the Dutch dikes, the dividing lines between properties that run through all of the Dutch landscape paintings of the XVII century. We cannot tell. Metaphor was never a condition of his painting, nor of his drawing.Delfim Sardo