Medals

The medals came about during an extracurricular course in medal making at the University of Fine Arts. The subject was supervised by sculptor Professor João Duarte, a great promoter of contemporary medals.

The fine arts are unquestionably products of sensibility and thought materialized in any two- or three-dimensional medium.

The medal, compared to painting or sculpture, which in the Renaissance freed themselves from the stigma of manuality by rethinking the status of the artist on a par with that of the intellectual, today continues to suffer from the prejudice of being considered a lesser art, more a product of craftsmanship than the bearer of socially committed and intervening aesthetic thought.

Of course, it’s not its size, because quantity is one thing and quality is quite another.

What is at stake is the relationship between production and the public, that is, the problem of taste and its cultural foundation in the light of Art History and ideas, aesthetics, etc.

Reflecting on the subject, what immediately stands out is the paucity of theoretical reflection on the medal as an artistic genre differentiated from other plastic arts. The medal is still Cinderella, the poor relation between its different sisters, painting and sculpture. 

In Portugal, medal making has tried to overcome this legacy, if only because

it is one of the (optional) subjects on the Sculpture course at the University of Fine Arts of  Lisbon.

 In the 1990s, particularly as a result of the work of sculptor Prof. Hélder Batista, the medal rejuvenated and interested new generations of sculptors and became an autonomous field of research, with prospects for technological and artistic innovation in search of its own space for contemporary intervention.

The flourishing of group and individual exhibitions is now proof of this vitality and the spirit of curiosity that is awakening it from its inedible formal redundancy, towards a modernity. 

The conquest of other semantic and technological territories prompted by an author’s poetics, accompanied by the corresponding theoretical reflection that legitimizes and nourishes the creative process itself, is contributing to the dynamic renewal of the medal genre.

Conventionality and singularities of the plan

Let’s think about the medal, other than one example, as a normative exercise of pure abstraction, trying, above all, to assess the set of requirements that contribute to elucidating the common meaning of the term.

By way of a brief contextualization, we could conclude that while until the beginning of the 20th century the normative consensus regime allowed for an unquestionable definition of the concept of medal, this is not the case today as individual hermeneutics tend to broaden, break or even corrupt the corset of the traditional legacy of this specific artistic genre. This is fundamentally the result of individual project poetics. In this context, we should start by listing some of the factors that make the genre invariable: 

1- the medal is a codified communication space; 

2 – its scale refers to the common dimensions of the hand, which thus characterizes it as an intimate object in transit, an object that is proportional and anthropometrically derived from the human body.

Medals – body and message 

In the fine arts, the medal is a genre conventionally identified by its following characteristics:

1 – It is an intimate object anthropometrically derived from the scale of the hand (usually does not exceed ten centimeters) 

2 – It is reproducible by some technological / industrial process (casting, minting or construction) 

3 – It has two faces – reverse and obverse – structurally symmetrical and parallel, derived from regular geometric solids – the cylinder and/or the straight quadrangular or rectangular prism (a typology that we call the “maria cookie” archetype, as opposed to the stereotype of the “bibelot”, formally more object-like and baroque)

4 – The composition of the surfaces integrates iconic and textual elements – the image and the caption.

Traditionally subject to commissions for occasional celebrations, in the last decade the medal has become an object of personal research. What began as an expressive exercise, marked by the virtuosity of craftsmanship (cast medals), has now become, within the limits of its identity and intelligibility, a sign of thought and cultural intervention. The normative conventionality of the genre has become the pretext for discourse. Its growing autonomy has made it possible not only to question the media in which it appears, but above all to select the messages to which it subscribes.  In a daily life marked by discursive trivialization, in inverse measure to the massive reproducibility of messages, the medal rediscovers the essence of objects as significant extensions of the subject’s corporeality, thus constituting the record of a process of interaction.

The challenge for these objects lies in the fact that they remain legible exercises within the orthodoxy, without giving up on expressing the non-conformity of inquiring into the world they socially world they socially cohabit and share.

Author
José Teixeira was born on November 3, 1960. He graduated in Sculpture and did his Master’s Degree in Art Theory at the University of Fine Arts of Lisbon, where he currently teaches fine Arts. As a sculptor, he has exhibited regularly since 1980, dedicating himself to medals since 1995.