We invite portuguese artists to create the labels for Esporão Reserva and Private Selection since 1985.
Dórdio Gomes was the first artist to begin this long journey full of great artworks. Born in the Alentejo, he studied in Paris and then went to Porto in his early years, where he settled and became a teacher at the School of Fine Arts. In time, he became one of Portugal’s most remarkable landscape painters in the first half of the twentieth century, focusing on Alentejo and Porto scenes. His modernist tendencies reached their peak in the 1920s, rapidly evolving from the naturalism learnt from his master Jean-Paul Laurens, into a sense of structure and stylisation corresponding to the visual assimilation that can be seen in Cézanne’s late phase.
Later, he turned to a style of painting which, though clearly marked by expressionism, remained true to his sense of landscape, while his teaching position proved decisive in the creation of a new approach to painting at the Porto School of Fine Arts, where he was extremely influential. Managing to radically change the school that had, until then, been rooted in naturalism and dominated by anachronistic aesthetic values, Dórdio finally opened it up to modernist taste and renewed its aesthetic awareness. He was a master to Júlio Resende, among others and, through Resende, his influence continued long after he retired from teaching. He left us a strong, solid body of work that is still an inspiration.
We had the pleasure of being part of his universe with this partnership. A painting made to the image of a wine, Esporão Reserva Red 1985, that reflects his landscape signature and inspiration in Alentejo.
