Cesariny

Mario Cesariny - Biographical Note 

  Cesariny Mário de Vasconcelos was born by chance in Vila Edith, in the Damaia Road in Benfica, where his parents were on holiday. Last child (three older sisters) Viriato de Vasconcelos, born in Viseu, Viseu, and his wife María de las Mercedes Cesariny (corsa paternal ancestry and Spanish mother), born in Paris. The father, a domineering personality and pragmatic, was goldsmith entrepreneur, with shop and workshop in Palma Street, in the parish of Santa Justa, in downtown Lisbon. 

After primary school, the young Mario attended for one year the Liceu Gil Vicente, after which the father (who wanted the goldsmith) changed it to chisel a course at the School of Decorative Arts Antonio Arroyo (where she met Artur do Cruzeiro Seixas and Fernando José Francisco), which completed. Then as he pleased not the work of a goldsmith, he attended a course enabling the Fine Arts. Also studied music, for free, with composer Fernando Lopes Graça. Cesariny was a talented pianist, but her father, enraged, forbade him to continue these studies. However, in late adolescence, Cesariny and friends attending various gatherings in the cafes of Lisbon and discover neorealism and then surrealism. 

In 1947, Cesariny travels to Paris where he attends the Académie de la Grande Chaumiere and meets André Breton, whose influence leads him to participate in the creation, in the same year, the Surrealist Group of Lisbon, along with figures such as Pedro António José Augusto França, Cândido Costa Pinto, Vespeira, Moniz Pereira and Alexandre O'Neill, who met at Mexican pastry. This group emerged as a form of libertarian protest against the Salazar regime and against the neo-realism, dominated by the Portuguese Communist Party, the Stalinist trend. Later, he founded the antigrupo (dissenting) The Surrealists which comprises among others the following authors António Maria Lisboa, Risques Pereira, Artur do Cruzeiro Seixas, Peter Oom, Fernando José Francisco and Mário-Henrique Leiria. 

It is also at this time that Viriato his father abandons the family to settle in Brazil with a lover. This causes Mario to come closer to his mother and his sister Henriette. 

In the 1950s, Cesariny devotes himself to painting, but also, and especially, poetry, writing in cafes. Collaboration has the Pyramid (1959-1960) magazine. Your editor is Luiz Pacheco, who later (in 1970) if incompatibilizaria altogether. It is also during this period that begins to be bothered and being watched by the Judicial Police for "suspicion of vagrancy", thanks to regular presentations and humiliating interrogations because of their homosexuality, they experience daily, frank and fearless way. Only from April 25, 1974 will no longer be persecuted and tormented by the police. 

Cesariny lived with financial difficulties, helped by the family. Despite the excellence of his writing, this was not holding him financially and Cesariny, from the mid-1960s, eventually devote entirely to painting as a way of subsistence. 

From the 1980s, the poetic work of Cesariny is reissued by the publisher Herminio Manuel Monteiro and rediscovered by a new generation of readers. 

Mario Cesariny adopting an aesthetic attitude of constant experimentation in his works and practice a technique of writing and (un) painting widely disseminated among the surrealists. His poetry is animated by a sense of challenge behaviors and institutionalized or considered normal in the fields of thought and morals principles. By resorting to typically surrealist processes (chaotic enumerations, systematic use of nonsensical or black humor, parodic forms, puns and other word games, automation, etc.) reaches a language that knows how to find the balance between the everyday and the unusual. Also introduces the designated "exquisite corpse" technique, which involves the construction of a work by three or four people in a creative work chain in which each continues in real time, the creativity of the previous, knowing only part of what this did. 

In recent years, developed a frenetic activity of transformation and rehabilitation of real everyday life, many of which were born collages with paintings, objects, installations and other materials fantasies. 

About the sessions for the invite and they applauded him, the poet commented: I am a very high pedestal, clap and then they let me go home alone. This is the English literary glory. 

In the last years of his life, Cesariny lived with her ​​older sister, Henriette (deceased in 2004). Unlike what happened earlier, opened to the media giving frequent interviews and talking about their intimate lives. In 2004, Miguel Gonçalves Mendes made ​​the documentary autographs, intense and moving film where Cesariny exposes and reveals the overall mood. 

Mario Cesariny died on November 26, 2006.