Before ESPIGA Pinto turned towards cosmic structures, maps of memory, performance and public space, there was the Alentejo. Not as picturesque landscape, nor as nostalgic rural image, but as the ground from which his visual language first emerged.
The Alentejo period is the beginning of ESPIGA’s world. Horses, carts, wheels, peasant women, village festivities, olive harvests, fields, tools and popular rituals became more than subjects. They became signs.
For those encountering ESPIGA Pinto for the first time, this period offers one of the clearest points of entry into his oeuvre. For the Estate, it also carries a particular intimacy. These are works rooted in the places, memories and forms that shaped the artist before they became part of a wider artistic language.
ESPIGA Pinto was born in Vila Viçosa in 1940. In later reflection, he wrote: “In my Fatherland-Motherland, I initiated my vision of the world.” The phrase is central. The Alentejo was not simply where he came from. It was where he first learned to see.
Untitled (Man with 2 mules), c. 1962. Monogrammed 'JME'. Indian ink and watercolour on paper. 54 x 46.5 cm
As a child, he was surrounded by forms that would remain with him throughout his life: horses passing the family home, wooden carts in the streets, stables, workshops, castle walls, markets, olive mills, village customs and religious-pagan festivities. He remembered making his first easel at the age of seven and going to draw at Vila Viçosa Castle. He also recalled watching a stonemason draw a female figure from a block of stone, an early encounter with the transformation of matter into image.
These memories mattered, but the Alentejo period was not made from memory alone. After studying sculpture at the Lisbon School of Fine Arts, ESPIGA returned to the Alentejo in 1960 and began teaching at the Industrial and Commercial School of Estremoz. He was no longer seeing that world through a child's eyes. He was an artist looking again, with the distance and intensity of adult attention.
In his text Of my beginnings, ESPIGA described this return as a renewed encounter with “the fields, the work, the peasant farmers, peasant women and horses”, as well as traditional clothing, markets, olive oil mills, popular celebrations and harvest feasts. He wrote that his childhood memories and the living traditions of the Alentejo became the “cosmic meaning” of his life and led him to the decision to “Sing the Alentejo”.
That phrase should not be misunderstood. ESPIGA was not illustrating regional customs. He was building a language from them.
Untitled (Country women / Camponesas), 1966. Signed & dated. Indian ink on paper. 23 x 19cm
The works of the 1960s include drawing, painting, sculpture, woodcut, linocut, works on cork and ink drawings. Their subjects are recognisable: the man with mules, the cart, the country woman, the horse, the bull, the festive banner, the wheel. Yet they are rarely anecdotal. Figures are often frontal, spare, compressed or emblematic. Backgrounds are stripped back. Forms are reduced. Gesture becomes structure.
This is why the Alentejo period is so important within ESPIGA’s development. It is figurative, but not merely descriptive. It is rooted in place, yet already moving towards abstraction.
David Santos, then director of the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Lisbon, described the peasantry and village life of the region as one of the strongest images of ESPIGA’s aesthetic, “in a kind of late neorealism”, while also noting the presence of self-irony and humour.
Luísa Cardoso, writing on works in the CAM Gulbenkian collection, makes the point that although the early works often present themes from the rural Alentejo, their formal language is already varied and sometimes close to abstraction. She identifies the use of single colour, expressive patches, open backgrounds, irony, humour and a growing geometric structuring of composition.
Joaquim Matos Chaves, professor at Porto's School of Fine Arts, recognised the same quality when he wrote that ESPIGA “was able to avoid any documentarian detours” and the temptations of the picturesque. This is one of the clearest ways to approach the period. ESPIGA’s Alentejo is not a record of rural life in the ordinary sense. It is rural life transformed into symbolic form.
The choice of materials deepens this transformation. Paper, wood, cork, ink, carved line and rough surfaces are not neutral supports. They carry associations with land, labour and matter. Woodcut and linocut were especially suited to ESPIGA’s search for directness. Their cut marks and strong contrasts allowed him to reduce figures to essential structures.
The horse is one of the most enduring examples. In his Interview in Monologue, ESPIGA explained its recurrence by returning to childhood: he was born in a house where horses passed his doorstep every day and where there were stables nearby. Yet he also linked the horse to beauty, shape and movement. The motif begins in lived memory, then opens into formal and symbolic possibility.
The same is true of the wheel. In the Alentejo, the wheel belongs to the cart and to rural labour. Later, in ESPIGA’s work, it becomes circular structure, orbit, sun, map and cosmic device. To look closely at the Alentejo period is to see the seed of the later oeuvre. The cosmic phase does not abandon the rural. It expands it.
Village festivities are another essential source. ESPIGA observed religious-pagan celebrations, harvest feasts and popular traditions both as remembered experience and as active cultural forms. In works featuring banners, festive arches or ceremonial figures, the image holds together the sacred and the everyday. These motifs belonged to communal life, ritual time and collective memory.
Untitled (Country woman with hat / Camponesa com chapéu), 1963. Bronze with limestone base. 36 x 3 x 6 cm
The female figure also enters the work early and remains central. ESPIGA spoke of being surrounded by women in childhood: mother, aunts, grandmother, cousins, maids and the peasant women who passed through the streets. In the Alentejo works, the country woman is not reduced to type. She becomes a figure through which the artist explores presence, labour, ritual, costume and memory. Later, the feminine would take on more mythic and cosmic dimensions, but the origin is already here.
The period also reveals ESPIGA as a young artist resisting easy classification. In the 1960s, Portuguese art was negotiating tensions between figuration, neo-realism, modernism, abstraction and the constraints of dictatorship. ESPIGA’s early work belongs to that historical field, but it does not sit comfortably in a single category. Its subjects appear rural and local; its formal intelligence is already modern and experimental.
This is partly why the Alentejo period continues to feel alive. It does not offer a settled image of rural Portugal. It offers a working language, still open, still testing itself. The works can be tender, humorous, severe, playful, solemn or strange. They often carry a quiet tension between affection and distance. ESPIGA knew this world intimately, but he did not sentimentalise it.
The years 1960 to 1966 formed the basis of what would later be recognised as one of his most acclaimed bodies of work. In 2010, the exhibition Of My Beginnings at Galeria São Mamede returned to works from 1959 to 1966. In 2025, the Estate’s exhibition Memórias do Alentejo / Memories of the Alentejo in Estremoz marked another significant return: the first exhibition of ESPIGA Pinto’s drawings, paintings and sculptures since his passing, and the first public presentation of the Alentejo Series in fifteen years.
That return to Estremoz was not incidental. It brought the work back to the place where much of it had been conceived. For the Family, it was also a return of memory to its landscape: a way of allowing the works to be seen again in the region from which they first took form.
For collectors, this is the importance of the period. Early Alentejo prints and works on paper are not simply images of a rural world. They are points of origin. They show ESPIGA discovering the motifs, materials and formal tensions that would carry through six decades: the horse, the wheel, the human figure, the earth, the festive sign, the transformation of memory into structure.
To collect from this period is to enter the work at its source. It is to encounter ESPIGA before the full cosmic expansion of the 1970s, but with the signs of that expansion already present. The rural image is beginning to become a symbolic system. The familiar is beginning to turn towards the universal.
ESPIGA Pinto’s later work would travel far from the countryside, into performance, stage design, public art, geometry, cosmic diagrams and maps of memory. Yet the path begins here: in the Alentejo, in the open fields and in the streets of Vila Viçosa and Estremoz, in the wheel of a cart, the movement of a horse, the figure of a woman, the rhythm of labour, the persistence of festivity.
The Alentejo was not a theme he outgrew. It was the vocabulary from which he built his very own grammar.
