Often considered to constitute an interval or a pause in his artistic production, the drawings by José de Guimarães (Guimarães, 1939) reflect, on the contrary, an intense exercise in transforming reality, covering a 50-year period of work.

This selection reflects a tiny portion of this prolific activity, which excludes a diversity of inspirations and references: the archaeological drawings (which the artist produced at the Sociedade Martins Sarmento, in Guimarães), the drawings made with a typewriter, airbrush , his erotic designs inspired by Japanese prints, his child-like sketches…

Establishing dialogue with works from the African art collection, pre-Columbian and ancient Chinese, the drawings refer to a process of becoming: men-animals, faces-masks, strange fruit-beings, docile serpent-figures … It is the idea of metamorphosis that pursues or, as the poet Carlos Poças Falcão wrote: “Everything draws everything. Everything is drawn by everything. There is an implication and correspondence of each thing in each thing, in a relationship that projects itself to infinity, in the great universal drawing”.