Manuel Pereira da Silva's work is organized into recognizable thematic groups that span decades and distinct expressive mediums. The artist's production can be divided into two orientations: the first includes pieces conceived according to the academic tradition of 19th-century Europe, generally in response to specific commissions; the second maintains the human figure as an essential reference, but departs from naturalistic representation, adopting formal criteria of abstraction. It is in this second aspect that the most personal and artistically richest series reside.
1. The Female Figure — Central Core of Poetics
The female figure constitutes the structuring axis of all of Pereira da Silva's work. He frequently addresses topics such as seated women, reclining women, motherhood, family, men and women, dance, and crucifixion. Although the figures in his works are sometimes almost completely dissolved into abstraction, there is a constant presence of perceptible figurative references, indicating an unbreakable connection with the representation of the human.
Critically, this persistence of the feminine is neither decorative nor conventional — it is structural. The woman's body serves the artist as a pretext for a formal exploration of volumes, balances, and plastic tensions. The seated, reclining, or resting woman allows for the study of the relationship between solids and voids, between the sculptural mass and the space that surrounds it — clear echoes of Henry Moore and, before him, Brancusi. However, Pereira da Silva never abandons the human pulse that distinguishes his work from a cold abstractionism.
2. Maternity — Between the Universal and the Monumental
Motherhood is perhaps the most identifiable and publicly visible series. In 1958, he created the bronze sculpture "Motherhood," installed in Praça do Marquês de Pombal, in Porto — one of the works with the greatest impact on Porto's public space.
This series engages with a long universal sculptural tradition (from Rodin to Moore), but imposes itself with its own language: a smooth geometrization of forms, a tendency towards the synthesis of pose, and the suppression of anatomical detail in favor of the essence of gesture. Motherhood in Manuel Pereira da Silva's work is not sentimentality — it is an architecture of bodies. The theme of motherhood also permeates his watercolor work, as evidenced by the 1961 work "Motherhood," in watercolor on cardboard, demonstrating that the artist worked on the same themes simultaneously in two-dimensional and three-dimensional media, revealing a remarkable coherence of formal research.
3. The Religious and Christological Series — Faith and Modernity
Pereira da Silva's religious work is one of his most ambitious and technically challenging. He studied fresco technique at the École des Beaux-Arts, which he used in one of his emblematic works in Viana do Castelo, in the main chapel of the Church of Santa Luzia, with the biblical narrative on the Christological theme: the "Passion of Christ" and the "Glorious Ascension".
This religious commission is, from a critical point of view, one of the most tense moments of his career: the modernist artist at the service of Christian iconography. The result — large-scale frescoes in a main chapel — forced him to negotiate between his abstract language and the narrative legibility demanded by religious tradition. In a previous exhibition, he had already presented a "Head of Christ" in watercolor, which shows that the Christological theme accompanied him before the large commissions and was also explored as independent artistic research.
The crucifixion series, recurrent in his graphic and pictorial work, is particularly revealing: the crucified body is, at the same time, a spiritual theme and a supreme formal challenge — the human figure at the limit of its extension, between the vertical and the horizontal, between life and death.
4. Monumental and Civic Sculpture — The Worker and the Popular Hero
One of the most extensive series is that of monuments honoring figures and professions within the social fabric. Among the works of this nature are the monument to the Farmer in Gulpilhares, the monuments to the Firefighters in Avintes, Gondomar, and Freamunde, the monument to the Athlete in Avintes, and the Monument to Industrialists and Workers of the Furniture Industry in Paredes.
The "Athlete," a life-size bronze piece, was commissioned by the Avintes Football Club to honor all athletes and their successes, and was inaugurated in 1973. This work exemplifies the tension between civic commission and artistic vision: the realism demanded by the popular portrait coexists with the formal elegance that is the sculptor's hallmark.
From a critical point of view, this series reveals an implicit political stance: by choosing the firefighter, the farmer, the athlete, the missionary priest—and not the general or the statesman—as subjects worthy of being monumentalized, Manuel Pereira da Silva is part of a humanist and popular tradition that, in the context of the Estado Novo (New State), had subtle subversive resonances.
5. The Historical and Narrative Bas-Relief
The bas-reliefs constitute a separate series, of enormous importance for understanding his formal language. The bas-relief of D. Pedro Pitões in the Palace of Justice in Porto is considered, by critics of the time, to be the most modern work of all the sculptures created in that building. In a simplicity of lines, D. Pedro de Pitões is depicted surrounded by several Crusader figures, with an abundance of geometric lines, both in the episcopal robes and in the warriors' armor.
In 1960, the African dimension enriched this corpus: he created "Africa," a polychrome earthenware bas-relief intended for the decoration of the facade of a building on the shore of Luanda Bay, Angola. The use of polychrome earthenware—uncommon in his work—reveals a capacity for technical adaptation to the cultural and climatic context of the commission.
6. Drawing and Painting — The Intimate Series
The aesthetic-artistic production that best assesses his poetics is that of drawing, an area in which he should be considered one of the most significant artists of today, and that of painting, in which his stylistic stratum is found and where his exceptional quality as a poet of the image can be ascertained.
The artist himself revealed the centrality of this series in his words: "It bores me to always be doing the same thing, so I was always looking for new languages, new to me, at least. I spent my life more drawing than sculpting, I drew, drew, drew."
The ballpoint pen drawing — an absolutely unconventional technique in 20th-century Portuguese sculpture — deserves special mention. It demands precision, does not allow for regret, and compels immediate synthesis. In these works on paper, Pereira da Silva frees himself from the constraints of the commission and the heavy materiality of stone and bronze, exploring with greater boldness the geometrization of the figure and the abstract-figurative tension that is the center of his poetics.
Overall Reading
What unites all these series is an invariable premise: the abstract formal orientation inspired by the human figure, especially men and women. The thematic variation — from religious to civic, from intimate to monumental — does not fragment the work; rather, it demonstrates the fecundity of a language that proves rich enough to traverse very different contexts without losing its identity.
The critical limitation that can be pointed out is the tension, not always resolved, between the demands of commissions and the freedom of personal research. In the freer series — drawings, watercolors, studio sculptures — the artist achieves a coherence and formal audacity that place him among the best of his generation. In public commissions, this audacity is sometimes mitigated by the need for legibility and conventional representation. This tension, however, far from being a weakness, is a faithful mirror of the condition of the 20th-century Portuguese modernist artist: between the avant-garde and the world around him.
