ArtSpace João Carvalho

Sam Abercromby: an astonishing and brilliant” Sebastianism Revisited

“As a foreigner, Sam Abercromby has acquired the detachment of an ethnologist who arrives in a different culture and discovers what is unique about it. Like the ethnologist seeking to uncover the structure of social organization, Abercromby seems to easily locate the identifying features of the landscape, in an approach that is not strictly naturalistic, but marked by a neo-lyrical ambience. Sam’s painting is almost always a kind of conceptual painting, which starts from a project, which presupposes research” – this is what we were writing in 1994, 28 years ago, on the pretext of the exhibition “Sombra, Céu e Serra” in Torres Novas, when the Australian artist, who had arrived in Portugal eight years earlier, had been dazzled by the olive groves of the Serra de Aire and produced a monographic series of pastels and oils, surprising us with a mountain range that none of us, who are from here, had ever seen like this.

That year, Sam already had a long career as a painter and multi-faceted artist, with stints in Greece, as early as 1968, Rome, Paris, and a return to Australia to carry out a major commission from the Australian government, a large-scale painting.

Arriving in this region in 1986, Sam Abercromby wandered around Tomar. He settled for a good few years in the big house of Paço, in Vila do Paço, painted frescoes, large canvases, became an artist of the land, harvested fruit and built his farm house with his own hands, realized his own musical projects, but above all left a vast artistic oeuvre that emerged from creative cycles, conceptual and experiential, where his autobiography and his characters were mixed into narratives dense with symbolic meanings and a dreamlike charge close to surrealist approaches or magical realism, if we can call that tendency to painting.

This exhibition, on show at ArtSpace João Carvalho, in Gouxaria, and which can be seen until the end of March, is Sam Abercromby’s hallucinatory journey into the classical mythologies of Sebastianismo, to which he has added, as is his wont, a “parallel reality” woven through symbolic intersections with his own historical-literary construction of the Portuguese myth and with his own life, within this astonishing tangle of life and death, of dream and mystery overflowing from the canvas and disturbing us as only great art can do. To see is a must, an imperative.” J.C.L.

Moagem Mendes Godinho, Tomar (2017)