ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the “primitivist impulse” of the Portuguese sculptor Ernesto Canto da Maya (1890–1981) by analyzing the artist’s work and a significant part of his correspondence made recently available to the public, both held by the Carlos Machado Museum in Ponta Delgada, Azores. Maya’s search for the “simple” and “immutable” is contextualized and interpreted, in its multifaceted expression, as a reaction to the modernization process. Faced with its perceived negative consequences or excesses, the quest for the “primitive” constituted a social and artistic regeneration route in the artist’s eyes. Maya’s sense of displacement relates to his struggle to counter alienation and attain a transcendental reconnection through art. In the discussion of the relatively uncommon plurality of temporal and spatial references present in his work, this chapter highlights how time and space are experienced under a primitivist gaze, relates the vagueness of geographic and chronological allusions in his sculpture with the imperial definitions then in force, and emphasizes processes of transfer, circulation, and interaction of interests and visual stimuli. The ambivalence of the search for the “authentic” in Maya’s life choices and creative process is itself the subject of examination and a key to grasping the Janus-faced nature of primitivism.
