Eduardo Batarda was born Eduardo Manuel Batarda Fernandes in Coimbra in 1943. After dropping out of medical school, Batarda enrolled at the Fine Arts Academy in Lisbon (1963-1968) where he graduated from its two successive painting courses in 1967 and 1968. After graduation, he served as a drafted officer in the Portuguese army (artillery) from 1968 to 1971. He would then undertake a three-year post-graduate course at the Royal College of Art in London (1971-1974) thanks to a Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation scholarship. He also obtained a MaRCA diploma and was awarded the Sir Alan Lane and John Minton Awards.
Batarda immediately adopted the medium of acrylic once it had become available in Portugal around 1965. Using these saturated colours, he would paint complex panel-based compositions laid out in a style similar to that of a comic book. Each panel put forth a different theme, thus allowing for contrasting subjects and discourses to co-exist – on an equal footing – in the same artwork. He was heavily influenced by popular media and images during his London postgraduate years, as the British Pop Art movement began to recycle cut-out imagery in original and sometimes surreal ensembles. Batarda used this opportunity to perfect and expand his watercolour technique, saturating pigments to emulate the American comics he drew from.
Thematically speaking, Batarda used eroticism to convey veiled social criticism. His work thus engendered considerable controversy and contestation, namely following his exhibition at the National Society of Fine Arts in Lisbon in 1966. However, rather than hindering his ascent, scandal – as for many of his contemporaries – helped jump-start his career. Other shows, such as Novas Iconológicas, held at Galeria Bucholz in 1967, and O Erotismo na Arte Moderna Portuguesa, held in 1977, would cement Batarda’s strategy of provocation, garnering negative reactions from the press and the public alike. The artwork No Chão Que Nem Uma Seta, painted in 1975, perhaps best captures the critical quality of this period.
The 1980s saw the artist revert to acrylics, thickening successive coats of paint in order to create a chromatic surface in its own right. On this surface, the artist would progressively come to paint and inscribe cryptic messages. Batarda later switched from narrative figuration to ethereal abstraction, with diluted meanings that explored the nature of the line, of movement, of colour and space, as in Néctar painted in 1984. It was around this time that he became a professor at the School of Fine Arts in Porto.
Batarda’s lasting influence and reverence for him have partly been secured thank to numerous retrospective exhibitions: in 1975, at the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon; in 1998, at the Modern Art Centre, Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon; in 2009, at the Manuel de Brito Art Centre, Algés, Oeiras (Lisbon); in 2011, at the Serralves Museum, Porto; in 2010, at the Modern Art Centre, Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon; and in 2016, at the Lisbon City Museum.
