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Escrita/Paisagem

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Taking its title from a 1976 work by Francisco Laranjo, Escrita/Paisagem (Writing/Landscape) brings together some of the artist’s works created between the 1970s and the 2020s. Spanning different decades, scales and media, the exhibition features works ranging from a tiny piece of canvas to a five-metre drawing, and employing techniques such as oil, Indian ink and watercolour. A central axis of his artistic path emerges: painting as a form of writing, a process of writing without storytelling. As art historian Laura Castro (2008) argues, his paintings are configured “as writing, as structure, as landscape”. 
He is not interested in representation, but rather in “symbolic places, signs, evocation, potency”, and he makes no distinction between drawing and painting, considering both to be “essential records that organise and communicate the fundamental”. Above all, his practice is affirmed by discipline and rigour, while historical references reveal affinities with Romanticism, Abstract Expressionism and Oriental calligraphy. 
In the early 1970s, he developed an interest in gesture, which he defined as “the first sign that has accompanied humanity throughout its history”. Through the discovery of colour values, new techniques and diverse atmospheres, his work transcends multiple dimensions. The shape of the circle, developed in a series of works, and the attention given to emptiness, deepen the relationship between gesture and suspension within the confines of the painting. 
Laranjo states that “almost all painting is landscape” – even when it does not depict one. For him, “landscapes are always projections of our gaze”. The temporal dialogues in these rooms thus reveal the singularity of Francisco Laranjo and his development of a very distinctive language, sustained by gesture, configuring painting as a place of inscription within infinite time.

Como olhar junto

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How to Look Together is a project by Brazilian artist Luiza Baldan developed on Cova do Vapor beach, at the meeting point between the Tagus River and the Portuguese Atlantic Ocean.
Over the course of one year, Baldan hosted gatherings at the Vapor Library, a community cultural space run by local volunteers, many of them elderly residents with direct ties to the area’s history. Based on these meetings, the project brings together individual narratives and collective memory in a territory marked by environmental and urban transformation, including coastal erosion, the loss of approximately 2 km of sandy shoreline, and the manual relocation of houses in the mid-20th century. The project results in an artist’s book (Fotô Editorial) that brings together a choral text, archival images, photographs by the artist, and documentation of activities, as well as a video co-directed with Patricia Black, built from two beach performances with community participation.

Video Synopsis

The video combines two performances recorded at different moments, focusing on symbolic and affective relationships between the community, the sea, and the Bugio Lighthouse.
The first performance takes place at sunset on the beach, along a shoreline that has been altered since the 1950s by erosion processes. Around a fire, five volunteer participants read aloud more than 400 names, marking a century of lives connected to the place, facing the Bugio Lighthouse, which was once closer and reachable on foot at low tide.
The second performance follows two octogenarian women on a boat crossing from Cova do Vapor bay to the Bugio Lighthouse. Although they had wished for this approach for over 50 years, it is the first time they make the journey, crossing by water the area that was once a beach. With songs and conversation, the scene works as a counterpoint to the first – not as a memorial act, but as the fulfillment of a long-deferred desire.
By juxtaposing the two situations, the video addresses proximity and distance, loss and belonging, linking individual memory and collective heritage within a changing territory.
The video project was developed in close collaboration with director, cinematographer, and editor Patricia Black, with cinematography also by Luiza Baldan, Aline Belfort, and Filipe Barrocas, direct sound by Pedro Rodrigues, sound design and composition by Nico Espinoza, and color grading by Andreia Bertini.

Erva, Fio e Pedra

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Life within things
by Joana Mendonça

Collecting stones, leaves, twigs, shells, sand and soil from the sea, and tea plants. These simple, repetitive gestures of gathering fulfil the pure act of creation that a small child recognises so well: creating works of art from raw materials at our disposal without depending on the capitalist process that traps visual artists in a repetitive cycle of reinvention.
We live in a time when collective movement is difficult, costly and largely invisible. However, there are artists who counter these trends by reusing materials, performing alchemical processes and creating rituals, insisting on the repetition of the creative process.
The desire to create unique works of poetic authorship causes swollen fingers and dry skin from kneading clay with one’s hands. It is a creative and constructive gesture, but also a political one, in which the subversive side is a desire for a self-sufficient, independent and solitary way of life. The act of creating is also an act of caring for one’s ancestry.
Through the accumulation of basic resources, the artist creates abundance using alchemical processes that produce something new, making us question the original materials.
Like people, plants and ceramics (among other resources used by Patrícia Geraldes), they are in constant motion, crossing borders and traversing new paths to reach us, reborn from their previous abandonment, with a wonderful light.This journey and her return home allow for cultural cross-pollination and the infiltration of knowledge, creating a memory that persists beyond these journeys. The texture of the pieces recognises the hands that created them, revealing the geographies necessary for their conception, from Trás-os-Montes to Porto’s unique riverside landscape.
The apparent whiteness of the porcelain extending from top to bottom in the cave room is activated by a green light. This light aims to purify, but is in fact radioactive and strangles us in a green capitalism that surrounds and petrifies us.
These are works of raw art that do not seek to save us, but to provoke. In an exhibition where every small element is the product of Patrícia Geraldes’s hands, and where the invitation to reflect is inherent, let us allow ourselves to be flooded and deceived. Perhaps life within things will become a little more bearable.