João da Câmara Leme: The Prodigious Decade

João da Câmara Leme (Beira, Mozambique, 1930 - Lisbon, 1983) will always stand out in the rich history of Portuguese illustration. The artist's inexhaustible inventiveness and extreme delicacy, both conceptual and graphic, mark his entire oeuvre. At a time when there is an abundance of talented illustrator-designers, Câmara Leme also stands out for the multiplicity of his registers, the sophistication of his graphic resources and a pictorial manuality of great sensitivity. His line will be a powerful authorial mark, transversal to all the graphic declinations of his work. João da Câmara Leme's artistic output is divided into two main areas: the tourism industry and book publishing. For the former, which he did very early on, from the late 1950s onwards, he produced catalogues, brochures and posters which, despite being part of the propaganda of the Estado Novo, he did with extreme formal elegance, even in the later registration of Lilliputian figures in graphic sculptures that suggest wood engraving. His work as a cover artist is basically concentrated in a single publishing house, Portugália, one of the strongest at the time. It was at Portugália that the artist would develop, in a meteoric decade, an absolutely brilliant graphic work, for a literary direction that would risk authors and genres far from the grey Portuguese culture and the watchful eye of Censorship. Inspired by the European and American avant-garde, João da Câmara Leme, an accomplice of poets and novelists, painters and designers, is completely committed to the art and culture of his time.