Galeria Nuno Centeno presents the ALL ANIMALS ARE BAD, ALL OF THEM ARE A MEAL AWAY FROM BARBARITY exhibition by Filipe Marques (1976, Vila do Conde, Portugal). It brings together various works created between 2023 and 2024, employing diverse techniques such as sound pieces, videos, drawings, and paintings on wood, as well as neon phrases wrapped in fabric. This exhibition materializes a contemplation on human vulnerability. Filipe Marques studied at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Porto and the Düsseldorf School of Art. He currently lives and works in Vila do Conde. His artistic practice reflects on popular culture, politics, and Western history, blending these themes with literary and iconographic references.

Text by João Terras

I’m writing this text after thinking that I’d forgotten I was to write to you. Seeing her at that moment you feel something scatological, I’m not sure. It wasn’t anything specific, it wasn’t any message or something I wanted to tell you about. When you know you won’t be able to talk again, it’s more the desire to talk to each other than the subject that drives us.
I had already promised you a text, and how many shortcomings.
The possibility of writing to a dead person is not the same as a dead person revealing what was left unsaid. Talking to a ghost is not the same as hearing from a ghost. In one place we speak of reality to death, in the other we speak of death to reality. Yet it’s the same thing.
If we could talk to Giuseppe Pelosi’s ghost again, what we would know would be the story of a ghost telling us the story of the moment of Pasolini’s death on the coast of Rome where his body turned up dead. About death as a whole, not even a film would be the true image.
If what we say is never everything and never enough, if what we try to tell is never what happened or what we felt, everything we write is in the same place as the story that remains untold.
I found out, moments later, that I would be able to talk to you again about how I found that life and death are the same, countless.
I don’t know the title of this exhibition, nor do I know what you thought of it, but this text is about it and about you.
The Jean Genet I’ve been reading recently wrote this, or at least, I’m sure someone translated something he wrote for us. I couldn’t find it written in French, nor have I had the opportunity to write to him. I don’t even know if I wanted to.
A man ends up belonging completely to his work. What’s left of him is good to trash, but before that, but just before that, he’ll still be painting (he describes a work here which I’ve removed so you don’t read it yet) He dies without having been tempted to play the clown.