This contact of mine with the region’s stones and nature turned me into an amateur archaeologist. Actually, I recall an excavation campaign organised by the University of Coimbra under the guidance of Prof. of the University of Oxford.

After finishing the fifth grade and a two-year stay in Braga to complete the seventh grade, I took off for Lisbon for seven years of the engineering course. I enrolled at the same time in the Sociedade de Gravadores Portugueses ( Association of Portuguese Engravers), the “Gravura”. That is when my passion for art began, and when I first entertained the idea of becoming a painter. This was in 1958 - I learnt the technics of engraving, I took my first steps in painting, I attended courses in Art History and, at the end of seven years I already possessed a primary baggage as a painter. Pop Art was the prevailing art movement.

In 1967, I set off on a military commission, to the former Portuguese colony of Angola. This was to be the beginning of an African experience/adventure that would last seven years. Coming to terms that the new continent, the cultural shock could not have been greater. However an uneasy start, I became very interested in discovering this new culture, witch was so different to my one western one, both in its ways of behaving and its concepts. The artistic expression of the native populations could be seen as much in tribal art (for example, sculptures) as in tattoos or mural paintings, with their respective symbols and signs. These were sometimes more coded, while at other times more narrative, like those depicting certain domestic, synergetic or war scenes.

Unlike Western Art, the strong magical-religious aspect of the tribal art transforms artistic objects into utilitarian works of art used in rituals. In general they are very explicit sculptures, some more mysterious than others, which, dependindg in their particular ingredients (mirrors, nails, bones), may be very magical in their content. In the case of tattoos, which are very characteristic of African peoples, there are human body inscriptions with clearly magical purposes. There is also the painting of symbols that on the male body have the power to win wars and on the female body can invoke fertility, etc.

However this is not the sum of all artistic expression. On occasion, they become true processes of communication (ideographic in form), which function as if they involved the written word itself. I am referring to particular tribes from the Cabinda region in the north of Angola, like the Ngoyos, who communicated with each other vie ideographic signs on the lids of domestic utensils, such as terrines. This is a type of relief work with meanings that vary according to the image used in each message, as if they were proverbs with strong moral content that are more effective than the spoken word.

As I already mentioned, my first contact with this new culture was extremely difficult. I felt alien and incapable of understanding anything. This situation lasted approximately two years, and was made more troublesome due to a lack of comparative parameters or links that allowed the transportation of this huge conceptual difference.

From 1970 onwards, and with some knowledge of tribal art and a desire to use painting as a means of communication and understanding via a kind of cultural osmosis between the two cultures. I began to create an ideographic alphabet made up of around one hundred and forty graphic characters. I can say that the most important transformation in my painting occurred after I began to understand African tribal art. Although it happens more in terms of content than forms, this transformation does not exclude the latter. This is what I wrote about this symbology in 1970: “Back art made me understand how to concentrate meaning and he mythical importance of forms. So in my paintings, form became a symbol and an agent of powerful intervention". In Africa, I saw how symbols were used and for what purpose. They are, in fact, the prerogative of great Ngoyo people of Cabinda, in the North of Angola, who used them so majestically on a daily basis. I appropriated part of their utility: more in terms of their rituals than of the meaning themselves.

The forms I gave them were generated and multiplied according to the pace of circumstances and the need to expand a vocabulary. With symbols; some nouns, other adjectives, some emancipated, others dependent; some generating others. Their genesis took two years (1970-1972) which were years of anguish ant intense contact with the African world.

Only later there was dialogue and, with it, the chance of better understanding African culture and people. It was precisely in this way, via a mysterious and coded vocabulary, the only dialogue possible that I, as an European, was able to establish with that African world; a world boasting a powerfully intuitive culture and one that expresses itself in ways which carry considerable powers of intervention".

Between 1970 and 1974 I created a body of work that I consider important to my artistic career and as the origin and root of all I do today. What I mean is that I began to create art was no longer the art of a European painter or an African painter, but rather an art that was miscegenation of two cultures. It was an art of ambiguity, so to speak; “morphemes”, as Gillo Dorfles called it; the transition between painting and sculpture; two-faced sculptures which provide double representation and double meaning.

The “African” alphabet, which others like Camonian, the Rubenesque, the Mexican, the Chinese followed, was always there in all of my artist work, even in the things I have done outside this period. It functioned as a kind of model or framework, in which other symbols and codes develop and progressed.

The passion for different cultures meant that I tried to surround myself with artist objects whenever possible, weather form pre-Hispanic culture, Chinese culture or African cultures. I remember that on my first stay in Angola I put together a small collection of tribal art, which is currently housed in the Sociedade Martins Sarmento Archaeology Museum in Guimarães. However, it was form the 1970s onwards that I started slowly but systematically collecting tribal art again, not only from Angola but from central Africa and from countries like Nigeria, Cameroon, Gabon, Mali, Burkina Faso, Sudan, Congo, Guinea, Ghana, the Ivory Coast, Togo, Benin, which I continue to do do this day. Among them, I have things from the Mambilas, Mendes, Kanacas, Tshokwes, Baules, Yaures, Cabindas, Fangues, Bagas, Punos, Igbos, Markas, Bambaras, Dogons, Kotas, Noks, Yorubas, Yakas, Dans, Jukubs, etc., which today I create a dialogue together in my Lisbon and Paris Studios, and in the New Interactional Art Centre of Guimarães, as if they were temples.

My main aim as a collector is not simply to collect. There is another side that has to do with recognising and respecting another culture as someone Portuguese. Portugal sailed the oceans, found new worlds, mixed and created miscegenation – to some degree, my artistic work has followed the trail od past navigators, seeking and feeding off the cultures of other regions. It is this encounter with, and respect for other cultures, that makes me admire them, making me want to see and appreciate them at close quarters through their art!

I ended up in Angola by chance, just as by chance, years later, I travelled to Mexico and, for the same reasons, travelled around Asia (China and Japan) where, in 1989, I started fruitful collaboration which is still standing today, with new, very diverse future projects in the horizon. And what is curious is the fact that it was my childhood, spent in Guimarães, with its rural scenery, its rocks, its mountains, its popular manifestations, a blending of religion and paganism that dominated my spiritual concerns. Then came Africa, through native culture, its artistic manifestations, tribal art, the practices and rituals; Mexico with Maya and Aztec cultures, its literature, Juan Rulfo, death and eroticism, the inframundo (underworld), and the “Mexican Alphabet” from archetypes of the archaeological cultures. And, almost simultaneously the Japanese projects, namely in kushiro, which led me to the study of the Ainu people, of their traditions, the tattoos, the decorated garments, their animist beliefs and practices and, once again, the production of signs, symbols and ideographic forms that would support an extensive project of urban intervention. And it does not ends here. I could also mention, for instance, the current development of Setouchi (a project in seven islands of the Seto Inland Sea, in Japan), which once again has lead me to the sociological study of each one of the region’s islands in order to produce a series of urban objects, integrating a vast project oh rehabilitation with the international participation of architects and artists, presented in July 2010. The more than 400 pieces of public art spread around several regions of Japan are, in their entirely, the reflection that the anthropological approach is perhaps the best way to better understand my artist process, which is based on the creation of ideographic alphabets, originating in very distinct cultures, which is based on the creation of ideographic alphabets, originating very distinct cultures, which my travels have afforded me.

In 1961, still a university student, I visited Paris for the first time, I stayed in a two-star hotel – the Hotel Istria- in Montparnasse. My stays in Paris became frequent. I recall having seen the great retrospective which France dedicated to Picasso in 1963 - this was probably one of the great thrills in my life. Whenever I could, I would spend my holidays in that fantastic city where I could read, see and admire what was so scarce in Portugal. IN 1995 I settle into an old 17th century house in the Rue Quincampoix, which I restored.

Africa, Mexico and Asia(China and Japan) are my “remote cultures” that form the “structure of kinship” which Lévi-Strauss studied in depth; communitarian areas where my entire body of work has delved, whether in the discovery of archetypes, or the tribal consciousness that identifies and distinguishes them. The more recent works of the Brazil series bring that cycle to a close and meet up with their African roots. We could summarise them thus: AFRICA | MEXICO | ASIA | BRAZIL.

The recent travels through Brazil have led me to the Yoruba people, African slaves that are the soul drive behind the foundation of Brazil. Once again, the symbols of the African series (1972-74) are used in the recent works of the Brazil series, intersecting and merging with the Mexican “papeles picados” and the Chinese folk art, creating the weft that supports the structure of the painting or forming the architecture of the “Favelas” installations; piled up boxes where clowns and supermen peep through ideographic windows, amid vibrant neon hearts that generate the energy for a sort of latent global war.

Now that I have read Lévi-Strauss in depth, I am more convinced that everything started on the day when, in my youth, I was an amateur archaeologist and in the excavation sites I was appointed the task of carrying out reconstruction drawings of “terra sigillata” objects, of which we only possessed a few potsherds.

José de Guimarães