Just another Portuguese man in search of something better was the wry and lucid way in which he himself summed up his personal and artistic path:

I was a student, locksmith, carpenter, upholsterer, lithographic printer, draughtsman, advertising professional, teacher, painter, photographer, harmonica player, emigrant, exile, museum director, adviser to ministers, researcher, journalist, poet, jury member, art galleries adviser, curator of international events, designer of industrial trade fairs, set designer, father of several children, grant recipient, and I have two homelands: one that made me and another that I’m helping to make. As you can see, I am just another Portuguese man in search of something better.

Bringing together photographs taken exclusively between 1949 and 1952 — a decisive and foundational period in his artistic work — produced within a short but intense phase, this exhibition presents one of the most distinctive bodies of Portuguese photography of the 20th century and a central moment in the surrealist experience in Portugal. Created in a context of profound artistic, political, and existential unrest, Fernando Lemos’s photographs are not mere records or formal exercises, but mental constructions, manifestations of the unconscious and desire, places where light and shadow become instruments of thought. Akin to the experiments of surrealist automatism, yet never surrendered to absolute chance, these images result from a subtle balance between impulse and control, between the unconscious and critical awareness.

As he himself stated, after the first automatic gesture, both writing and photography became directed and programmed, fully assuming their conceptual dimension.

Portraits, self-portraits and figures from his close circle appear here as unsettling presences, suspended between light and shadow, revelation and concealment. The dramatic use of lighting, tight framing and games of masking and identity transform the body and the face into symbolic territory, reflecting desire, irony, anguish, and humour. These are images that do not merely ask to be seen: they stare back at us, question us, and place us in a direct and disturbing relationship with reality.

This photographic body of work developed in parallel with Fernando Lemos’s intense involvement in the Portuguese surrealist movement, particularly in the period leading up to the 1952 exhibition with Vespeira and Azevedo at Casa Jalco and to his departure for Brazil in 1953. Photography emerges here as a privileged field of resistance and freedom, capable of subverting the codes of representation and rehabilitating reality in the sense advanced by Mário Cesariny.

Although brief in time, this body of photographs has left a lasting mark on the interpretation of Fernando Lemos’s work and his place in the history of modern and contemporary art. As he himself wrote, he was “a drop of water that refused the deluge” — a fitting metaphor for an oeuvre that, never dissolving into consensus, remains alive, restless, and luminous.

Curators
Marlene Oliveira and Perfecto E. Cuadrado