Burghard Baltrusch (Vigo Uni.) is going to be at the Faculty of Arts of the University of Porto’s Central Library on the 28th of September. The conference will start at 4:30 pm and is entitled Painting is a silent poetry and poetry is a painting that speaks – José Saramago ‘illustrated’ by Graça Morais.

Abstract

The works of José Saramago and Graça Morais establish continuous dialogues with the political and social reality, with the places and history of those who did not have or do not have a voice, but also with literature in general, and with poetry in particular. They offer to reflect on the poetic-political in art and literature, especially through the series of illustrations that Graça Morais made, in 1987, for the poetry book O Ano de 1993, by José Saramago. These are two works little studied still. I will try to sketch an analysis of the intermedial fusion of the poetic and political dimensions in these two artistic creations, in which ‘painting is a silent poetry and poetry is a painting that speaks’, as said by Simónides de Ceo, the great innovator of the poetry of Greek antiquity, whom they called the ‘Greek Voltaire’ (Lessing). From Graça Morais we could say that he not only illustrated Saramago in the pictorial sense of the word, but that he also illuminated and continued his poetic-political proposal.