A Personal Testimony From Day One of this Tile Work at Macau Airport
I accompanied my husband Eduardo Nery from day one when he was invited to visit Macau airport, which was still under construction in May 1994.
It was an absolutely unexpected invitation. A friend of my parents, Manuel Machado, who at the time was Deputy Secretary of Public Works, met us casually and, having known for a long time about Eduardo Nery's vast public works, invited us to visit Macau, specifically the airport. They wanted to leave a piece of work that represented the connection between the three cultures - Chinese, Portuguese and Macanese - in history.
Of course, Eduardo Nery, given to few adventures, only accepted the invitation with my stubbornness and insistence. At the time, he had several works in hand. The ceramic tile panel at Av. Infante Santo, Lisbon 94, the Pharmacy Association, tiled façades and interiors and the glass mosaic dome at Caixa Geral de Depósitos, on Av. João XXI in Lisbon.
We visited Macau for the first time in mid-May. We travelled via London, Hong Kong, Jetfoil and finally Macau, where we stayed at the iconic Hotel Lisboa.
Eduardo Nery, also a great and excellent photographer since the age of 14, took along his numerous cameras and photographic accessories and began to photograph, as always, exhaustively before, during and after.
I went to Macau seventeen times, fifteen times with Eduardo and twice more at the invitation of the Deputy Secretary for Social Affairs and Budget to take part in a congress entitled "The Third Age in Asian and American Countries and Macau" where I presented "an outside look at Social Work in Macau".
That was fourteen business trips in almost a year!
It was truly a heroic feat! Studying, thinking, drawing and hand-painting hundreds of models, constant trips to the Viúva Lamego tile factory to check and correct the figurative drawings, choosing the colour palette, checking the marking on the back of the tiles with letters and numbers for later placement on the extensive 210-metre long by 2-metre 10-centimetre high strip at the airport.
These were always very stressful journeys for Eduardo Nery, very long journeys, with huge differences in time zones and, especially for a compulsive pipe smoker, deprived of his addiction for hours on end, he was almost like a "beast", finally appeased when he could finally smoke to his heart's content.
In Macau, lots of work meetings, photography, presentation of models, rejection, and rectification of some, already in Lisbon. We almost went to Macau every month!
I loved it and I also took the opportunity to take slides of all the units in the fields of education, health and social support, which I could then use to present at the congress.
From day one, as I've already mentioned, being used to my profession as a psychologist, therapist and psycho-pedagogue, I took slide photos of the start of the great work, the rush of books, research, drawing and painting on the drawing board, trips to the Viúva Lamego factory, the whole tile-making process, the enlargements of the drawings on the tiles, the colours of the geometric and plain tiles.
Eduardo Nery bought lots of books as soon as he arrived in Lisbon, because the Book Fair was open at the time, to document the influence of Portuguese culture, the role of the Jesuits, Chinese and Macanese cultures.
One of the premises of this work was that it should be figurative. At that point in his career, Eduardo didn't like doing anything figurative, but as he was a researcher, a man who was interested in many and varied subjects and very serious and in-depth in his research, he began to sketch his very extensive tile work, which is in the departure lounge of the passenger terminal at Macau airport.
He began by hand-drawing and painting the figurative parts and then the geometric mesh with coloured tiles, where these elements alluding to different cultures are "entangled" like "splashes" of a story told by figures.
Eduardo Nery was the most important Portuguese artist in the Optic Art movement from the 1960s until the end of his life, bringing Optic Art to the architectural space at the Water Treatment Plant in Asseiceira, Portugal. He was the creator of the colour discipline at the IADE school and at the A.R.C.O., where he was a teacher.
He applied this demanding knowledge to his vast oeuvre of tapestries, vitreous mosaics, tiles and stained glass paintings.
On 9 November 1995, the immense work was finished and ready for the airport's inauguration.
He was also asked to make four serigraphs to give to the guests, two in blue and white and two with Chinese motifs, the Dragon and the Phoenix and the Temple of Á-Má.
All of this valuable public art and photographic collection is deposited in the Sacavém Fort archive of the Directorate General for Cultural Heritage of the Portuguese Ministry of Culture, under the care of its fantastic curator, Dr João Nuno Reis.
The following year, on 10 June 1996, Eduardo Nery was awarded the Medal of Cultural Merit in Macau by Governor Rocha Vieira. We returned to Macau again on the transfer of sovereignty of Macau from Portugal to the People's Republic of China on 20 December 1999.
It was a great pleasure to write this text, a month and a half after major cardio-thoracic surgery to replace an aortic valve.
I hope it's not too long and boring to read and that one day, who knows, I'll be able to visit Macau again, where I enjoyed my stay so much and once again have the pleasure of seeing my husband Eduardo Nery's tile panel.
April 2, 2024
Maria da Graça Nery