António Olaio at the NO·NO Gallery: On (not) Falling

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DATE

11 Mar 2026

AUTHOR

Dela Christin Miessen

António Olaio at the NO·NO Gallery: On (not) Falling

AUTHOR

Dela Christin Miessen

“In NO·NO’s current exhibition Playing with Gravity, António Olaio approaches gravity as an “unstable interval between being image and being thing, between representing and happening”. Bright figures tilt, bend, stretch, sometimes bearing his own features."

I used to think that gravity was personal. Not in the scientific way, more in the sense that it had a preference. I was convinced that when I jumped from the third stair - never the fourth, that would be too high - gravity was watching me, debating whether I would commit properly this time. Whether I would bend my knees enough, whether I deserved a clean landing. Sometimes I would drop abruptly, as if gravity got impatient with me, other times I seemed to stay a little longer in the air.

Gravity

(noun)

1. (Physics) the force that attracts a body towards the centre of the earth, or towards any other physical body having mass

2. extreme importance; seriousness

3. solemnity of manner

I would often lie on the living room carpet trying to feel the earth pulling me to its center - whatever that must look like. I imagined tiny energetic ropes attached to my spine, extending through the floor, the pipes, the soil, fossils, old bones, more soil, all the way to something very abstract at the center. Wondering if the center knew that I was lying all the way above it, trying to connect. Was it reciprocal?

In NO·NO’s current exhibition Playing with Gravity, António Olaio approaches gravity as an “unstable interval between being image and being thing, between representing and happening”. Bright figures tilt, bend, stretch, sometimes bearing his own features. A familiar self-portrait strategy he has deployed for decades.

Olaio is known for undermining the solemnity of painting by inserting himself as both protagonist and caricature. In his earlier works, textual interventions (ironic declarations, exaggerated affirmations of artistic identity) disrupted the image’s claim to seriousness.

In his new show, this dynamic becomes spatial. Bodies seem caught mid-adjustment, as if the ground of the painting were slowly shifting. Gravity seems reversed. Objects look light and heavy at the same time.

Since modernism, painting has oscillated between embracing flatness and reasserting illusion. Olaio seems to play with this tension rather than resolving it. His surfaces acknowledge their own materiality, yet his figures insist on volume, on bodily presence. The self-portrait, once a declaration of mastery, becomes a measuring device of instability: how much can the image tolerate before it loses coherence? How much irony before sincerity seeps back in?

Returning to the child on the carpet, trying to feel the Earth’s centre: the desire was never really to fall, but to confirm connection. Gravity as proof of belonging to a system larger than oneself. In Playing With Gravity, what could that system be?

Some of the shapes seem mid-fall. Others appear to have landed and are pretending stability was always the plan. The rounded pink mass strains against its spindly blue legs, testing how much pressure they can bear. The purple, toy-like creature perched on a bending limb, both balanced and about to roll. The elongated green shape hangs with the seriousness of something meant to drop, while the swollen blue cloud-forms inflate upward, as if rehearsing defiance.

As a child, I thought falling was a collaboration. Maybe these works do too? Trusting the white of the paper, the way I trusted the third stair. Testing it, slightly moody. Everything seems to be practicing how to carry its own mass, playing with gravity.

I no longer test gravity from staircases. But I still suspect it notices when someone(/thing) commits to falling.

The exhibition is on view until March 21, 2026.

BIOGRAPHY

Dela Christin Miessen is a researcher, writer and editor. She is part of Aberta Studio in Lisbon and the co-founder of Echoes Residency for socially engaged art practices.

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