Aldina

Maria Aldina da Costa Neves Forte (who signed her works as Aldina) was born in Caldas da Rainha in 1939 and died in Lisbon in 2011. She studied at the António Arroio School of Decorative Arts and graduated from the Lisbon School of Fine Arts with a thesis on the so-called Café Gelo Group. She was a teacher of ceramic painting at the António Arroio School and established herself, since the 1960s, through the quality of her plastic arts in painting, drawing, and ceramics, and is represented in the Museum of Contemporary Art and various private collections, both national and foreign. Having numerous solo exhibitions and participations in group shows on her resume, Aldina established a peculiar relationship with the literary sphere, which led her to collaborate in periodicals such as & etc. – Magazine das Artes, das Letras e do Espectáculo, Diário de Lisboa, and Abril em Maio. Furthermore, her paintings and drawings can be found on the covers or inside books for adult audiences by writers such as Aquilino Ribeiro, José Cardoso Pires, António José Forte, Sofia Crespo, and Fátima Maldonado. One of these writers wrote about her visual work: “What surprises in Aldina is the tone, which is very much our own, Portuguese; the compulsive fracture represented by her paintings and the unbalanced reality they seem to insinuate. Each one is a small whole suspended in chance, in nothing (whites and bare canvas where a dense cluster of forms hovers) and it is in this irrational suspension that poor and compromised fragments of objects, machines, and human signs live, all presented to us in disunion yet deeply clung to one another by despair and the fury of living" (José Cardoso Pires, quoted in Aldina (8-2-2011)). Aldina's connections to surrealism have been visible since the sixties and run through the illustrations of the 2nd edition of a fine children's poetry book published by her husband, the poet António José Forte (v.), also associated with the second surrealist generation in Portugal. We refer to Uma rosa na tromba de um elefante, a work that earned Aldina a Special Mention from the jury of the 2001 National Illustration Prize. Bibliography: António José Forte, Uma rosa na tromba de um elefante (2001), Lisbon: Parceria A. M. Pereira (2nd edition with new illustrations). [José António Gomes]