If the Alentejo period is where ESPIGA Pinto’s visual language begins, the cosmic period is where it opens outward. From the late 1960s through the 1970s, the horse, the wheel, the festive sign and the human figure moved beyond rural memory into a wider reflection on space, energy, communication and the condition of the world.
ESPIGA himself gave the clearest formulation when he described his work as having “feet on the ground, head in the cosmos”. The phrase matters because it resists the idea of escape. The cosmic works are not detached from earth, politics or memory. They emerge from them.
'Painted volumes'. ESPIGA's Lisbon Studio. 1969.
By 1968, the transition was already visible. His exhibition at the Sociedade Nacional de Belas-Artes in Lisbon marked a moment when the imagery of the Alentejo began to loosen from narrative setting. Animals, bodies, wheels and festive structures became more autonomous, more geometric, more spatial. The image was no longer only a scene. It was becoming a system of signs.
Luísa Cardoso, writing on works in the CAM Gulbenkian collection, identifies this passage with precision. ESPIGA’s experimentation with abstraction, she notes, had already appeared alongside figuration in the 1960s. In the following decade, geometry and abstraction took on a new scale, joined to an expanded reflection on space and on the symbolic potential of art in public life.
This is the essential transformation of the cosmic period. ESPIGA was no longer thinking only in terms of canvas, paper or panel. He was thinking through stage, city, sculpture, performance, body and environment.
The 1970s were a decade of unusual intensity. ESPIGA worked across painting, drawing, printmaking, sculpture, stage design, performance and public-space research. He collaborated with the Gulbenkian Ballet and Teatro Experimental de Cascais. His stage work received Portugal’s Press Award, today the Bordalo Award, in 1970. In 1973, he was awarded the São Paulo Biennial Prize for the sets and costumes of Dulcinea, created for the Gulbenkian Ballet Company.
Solo show. Galeria Alvarez, 1974.
Stage design helped sharpen his understanding of space. Forms were no longer arranged only on a surface; they had to relate to bodies, light, movement and time. This theatrical intelligence fed directly into his sculpture, installation, performance and urban projects.
In 1972, ESPIGA presented Egotemponírico at Casa da Carruagem, in Valadares, within the artistic circle fostered by Jaime Isidoro, founder of Galeria Alvarez and a central figure in the support of Portuguese avant-garde activity before the Revolution of 1974. Helena Mendes Pereira, writing on Jaime Isidoro and the early history of performance in Portugal, places ESPIGA’s actions in Valadares and at the Arrábida Bridge among the formative moments of Portuguese performance.
Poster. ESPIGA's 1972 performance in Valadares.
Casa da Carruagem was more than an exhibition site. It was a place of artistic communion: a meeting ground for artists, critics, poets and cultural figures who were testing new forms of expression in a Portugal still marked by dictatorship and cultural isolation. ESPIGA’s work with Isidoro belongs to that atmosphere of risk, friendship and invention.
The wider international context also matters. The 2023 exhibition catalogue Exilados: do arquivo de Henrique Silva aos artistas em Paris, curated by Helena Mendes Pereira and Mafalda Santos, places ESPIGA within the broader network of Portuguese artists present in Paris, alongside figures such as Mário Cesariny, Manuel Cargaleiro, Eduardo Luiz, Maria Helena Vieira da Silva, Arpad Szenes, Lourdes Castro, René Bértholo, António Costa Pinheiro, João Vieira and José Escada.
ESPIGA's own travels to Munich, London, Stockholm, Paris, New York are a testimony to the wider Portuguese search for artistic freedom, exchange and modernity beyond national confinement.
ESPIGA's 1973 Round Book, published by Jaime Isidoro’s Galeria Alvarez, belongs to this same moment. Conceived in circular format, it gathers many of the images and ideas that define the cosmic period: the hand, the sphere, the circle, the diagram, the stage set, the public mural, sculpture in space and the performance-installation. Cardoso identifies this circular catalogue-book as a key source for understanding ESPIGA’s cosmic-symbolic, performative and urban-space research.
The hand is one of the period’s recurring motifs. It appears as a sign of making, measuring, touching, creating and destroying. It connects the body to the universe, and reminds us that ESPIGA’s cosmic work is never purely abstract. Even at its most speculative, it remains tied to human gesture.
The circle and sphere are equally central. They suggest sun, planet, orbit, wheel, eye, map and stage. They also connect the cosmic period back to the Alentejo. The cartwheel of rural life becomes part of a larger circular language. The memory of the earth becomes a reflection on the planet.
'Terra Marcada No. 2', 1971. Silkscreen on paper glued on fabric.
This is why works such as the Terra Marcada series are so important. Made in the early 1970s, they express ESPIGA’s environmental concern and anti-war stance through a geometric, abstract and symbolic language. Their context is a decade marked by Cold War anxiety, the Vietnam War, ecological awakening, decolonisation, technological acceleration and the search for alternative futures.
ESPIGA did not illustrate these pressures literally. He transformed them into signs: blood-stained earth, explosion, orbiting forms, broken structures, hands, diagrams and cosmic fields. The result is a language of vulnerability and interdependence, but also of possible renewal.
Cardoso describes ESPIGA’s imagery in the 1970s as combining technology, science fiction, poeticism and cosmic mysticism in the creation of a utopia. That utopian dimension should not be read as fantasy. It is a search for connection at a time when political, ecological and social systems seemed unstable.
The Carnation Revolution of 1974 gave that search new historical force. The end of dictatorship, the beginning of decolonisation and Portugal’s emergence from long cultural isolation intensified questions already present in ESPIGA’s work: how art might enter public space, how it might create community, how it might imagine communication beyond existing structures.
ESPIGA in London. 1974. Photo © Estate of José Manuel Espiga Pinto.
His notebooks and studies from the period reveal the scale of this ambition. They include designs for devices of cosmic artistic-poetic communication, with references to oneiric structures, sound-sensitive elements and materials such as plexiglass, bronze, copper, light bulbs, ropes, polyester, wood, mirror, metal bearings and coloured spheres. Some remained unrealised, but they show an artist imagining not only images, but instruments.
This is what gives the cosmic period its particular force. Boundaries between disciplines become porous. A drawing may be a plan for a sculpture. A sculpture may require activation by bodies. A stage design may lead to a public-space project. A performance may test the relation between gesture, sun, earth and time.
In 1973-74, ESPIGA received a scholarship from the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation to continue research into urban-space interventions in Sweden and France. This international research belongs to the same arc as the stage designs, performances and public works. It confirms an artist thinking beyond the studio, asking how symbolic forms might operate in shared space.
The art historian Cecília Eiró later wrote of ESPIGA’s pursuit of “cosmic harmony in which all elements of the Universe participate”. The phrase captures the period’s ambition: not harmony as decoration, but relation. Between body and planet. Image and space. Memory and future. Art and community.
'ONIRICA/22D. - Self-portrait with map of Portugal and woman. 1970.' White gouache on black cardboard.
For collectors, the cosmic period offers access to ESPIGA at his most experimental and conceptually expansive. Prints, artist’s books, studies and related works from these years are not only visually compelling; they belong to a moment when the artist was testing what an artwork could be, and where it could act.
The period also has growing institutional importance. In 2020, CAM Gulbenkian received a major donation of works by ESPIGA Pinto from the 1960s to the 1980s, including drawings, notebooks, sculptures, engravings and a catalogue-book. These materials help place his 1970s output within a broader history of Portuguese post-war art, symbolic abstraction, performance and public-space research.
ESPIGA Pinto’s cosmic work asks us to think beyond the separation between earth and universe. It suggests that the path from the Alentejo to the cosmos is not a departure, but a continuation. The world begins underfoot, then opens outward and upward — the microcosmos and the macrocosmos connect.
