João Abel Manta

His cartoons marked the period before the Carnation Revolution with their unique and meticulous graphic quality: "No painter of today has summarised the social and political temperature of the death throes of Fascism with such subtlety".

[4] His political intervention is intensified in 1974 and 1975, straight after the fall of the dictatorship, hurling himself into "the battle with redoubled keenness, multiplying himself in caricatures, posters and hoardings with a markedly revolutionary orientation", and becoming the "maximum artist, perhaps the only one, after all, that the April revolution called upon".

[5] He questioned the identity of a country in turmoil in drawings such as A Difficult Problem, where a group of outstanding figures from the past – from Karl Marx to Trotsky and Sartre – stare inquisitively at a small map of Portugal on a blackboard.

[6] From 1976 on "the enlisted artist João Abel is eclipsed: the winds are different, the MFA (Armed Forces Movement) is dissolved", and it is only in 1978 that "he emerges from the silence and launches a […] new album: Caricatures of the Salazar Years ",[7] in which he "narrates a story – our story […] in which the ridiculous and the tragedy of colonization and the colonial war, Miguelism and Liberalism […] popular submission and revolt […] local traditional music and crafts, the theatre, the cinema and painting […] fit together, alternate or are linked to each other".

[10] João Abel Manta’s disturbing view fuses "everyday life and the fantastic, in Lisbon landscapes invaded by strange beings,[11] alongside a recurring presence of self-figurations that refer to a self-confessional territory hitherto unknown in his work.