René
Bertholo

René Bertholo (b. 1935 in Alhandra/Portugal; d. 2005 in Vila Nova de Cacela/Portugal) came to West Berlin in 1972 as a fellow of the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program (BKP), together with his wife, Lourdes Castro. Bertholo was one of the leading representatives of Pop art in Portugal. The painter and sculptor is best known for his small, motorized models made of metal and Plexiglas (“Modèles Réduits”, initiated in 1966) that revolve around the natural elements: sun, water, wind, the chromatic spectrum of rainbows, and, very often, diverse cloud formations. In a series of repetitive, minimalistic movements that last up to ten minutes, familiar phenomena occur: the sun appears and disappears on the horizon; clouds pass by; the shadow of two palm trees grows and shrinks; a buoy is tossed back and forth by waves. In Bertholo’s mechanical works from the early 1970s, some of which were made in Berlin, the principle of chance is introduced through the addition of a metal ball: once set in motion by motors, it activates the electrical contacts as it follows its unpredictable course inside a transparent casing, similar to the ball in a pinball machine. This is how the irregular path of a dolphin through waves is created, for example (Le Dauphin, 1972), and how cloud formations continually overlap (Nuage à surface variable, 1971–72).

From September to October 1973 the Artists-in-Berlin Program presented Ein Jahr in Berlin, a joint exhibition of works produced by René Bertholo and Lourdes Castro during their time in Berlin. It included various models and circuit diagrams for Bertholo’s “Modèles Réduits,” above all his mechanical sculpture La mer (1972); this featured “waves” generated by an aleatoric electromechanical program that was developed with support from the Institut für Werkzeugmaschinen at the TU Berlin. The two-person exhibition, which was accompanied by a small catalogue in the form of a brochure, was the first in a new series of BKP exhibitions which, rather than showing a comprehensive retrospective of the fellows’ artistic practice, presented a straightforward “report” focusing specifically on the works and projects they had developed in Berlin.

Text: Eva Scharrer

Translation: Jacqueline Todd