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Eclipse, by Diogo Evangelista, at Alfaia
After curating the group exhibition Mar Deserto – Oxímoros para uma ausência two years ago, Leonor Lloret is once again associated with Alfaia and is now presenting an exhibition in Loulé featuring Diogo Evangelista (b. 1984), showcasing a unique work in 11 parts: eleven pieces of gilded acrylic mirror with ultraviolet ink applied, constituting Eclipse.
Suspended from the gallery ceiling at varying heights, they suggest, through the overlapping patterns of black dots on the gilded surface of the mirrors, different phases of a solar eclipse. The interpretation is figurative, as the shape of each piece reproduces the incomplete circles corresponding to the moments of the astronomical phenomenon, but it is equally symbolic. First, because the exhibition leaflet reproduces as an epigraph words by Michelangelo Antonioni, whose 1962 film, O Eclipse (L’Eclisse), uses the obscuration of the sun as a metaphor for the moments when life, so to speak, comes to a standstill, communication is hidden or hindered, and human relationships regress or become hampered. Sunlight, more than symbolically, is equivalent to life, to the progress of beings on Earth. However, much science allows us to know and understand the phenomenon today, experiencing it – knowing of its possibility – still imposes on reason the dimension of the unintelligible.
Evangelista's work interposes itself in this place of the irrepressible, proposing that an eclipse results in reflections, movement, change, and inconstancy of forms. Nothing will be surprising in a visit to this exhibition – how everything becomes possible from the moment of the day, because the moon intrudes between Earth and Sun, transforming into night. "There is nothing unexpected, nor anything that one swears does not exist, / nor anything surprising, since Zeus, father of the Olympians, / made night of midday, hiding the light / of the shining sun," wrote Archilochus about a solar eclipse, more than six centuries before our era: "Desde então, pode acreditar-se e esperar-se que tudo / suceda aos humanos..." ("Since then, one can believe and expect that everything / will happen to humans…")1 Everything can be expected. The artist himself confesses that, during the assembly of the pieces, he realized how the back of each one revealed itself as a kind of photographic negative, in the same gesture of multiple interpretation, of proliferation of meanings that he intended. One of the reasons he chose "eclipse" as the title of the exhibition, he continues (in the conversation he had with me during the opening), was the almost universality of the word, the way it does not delimit a culture or geography and spreads throughout the world, in the same way that the sun is perceived or its momentary concealment. It is the universal that seeks, in balance with the local visitor, who enters the space of the piece, walks among the various mirrors and sees himself incorporated into the eclipse – in the slow, almost imperceptible movement of each "sun," in the shadows projected onto the floor and walls of the world that is the gallery, in the game of deconstructing the sequence of pieces. Which one is the first? Are they counted from the entrance into the gallery? Which is the eleventh? When did this eclipse begin? Was it when I entered? Or will it begin when you leave? The gallery lighting thickens the twilight in which an "exercise in deliberate blindness" is urgently needed, as the curator proposes in the exhibition leaflet, suggesting that the "blackout functions as a portal" through which each visitor can deliberately advance towards "human vulnerability in the face of the cosmos and technology" (the cosmos that the work symbolizes and the technology that made it exist; the cosmos that haunts every human being; the technology that, through its inventions, increasingly haunts).
How can one simultaneously read the universe and a grain of sand? The pieces in Eclipse can be seen as letters of an alphabet that would aid such reading, but those corresponding to the almost total absence of the solar circle resemble parentheses within which any sentence that can be constructed from there is placed. In the recent exhibition CORE (Francisco Fino Gallery, Lisbon, between November of last year and January 2026), the six pieces that the artist showed, on a similar support of mirrored surfaces painted with UV ink, received names such as Center, Nub, Kernel, Gist, Nib, Essence – the nomenclature, related to the nucleus, or the center of life (the pieces had an oval shape and referred to the egg as origin) assumed the same relevance as that revealed in Eclipse. It is not so much a scientific terminology that is sought, but rather a way of suggesting recognition through the name, whether through a title recognizable in several languages, or in the language that is most universally recognized. It is a gesture of approach without determinism, of questioning without the finiteness of an answer – of thought wandering through the world when, at the time when sunlight should illuminate, it hides itself.
Diogo Evangelista's artistic journey began in painting; in 2009, for example, he contributed to the exhibition celebrating the 55th anniversary of Galeria 111 in Lisbon – Além Deste Solitário Carrossel – with a small work in oil, varnish, and paper on canvas, a flower whose center could be either the flower itself or the image of a bee landing on it. He continues to work – significantly – with experimental video, both individually and in creative partnerships, and with sculpture. Although he does not present video pieces, this Eclipse hovers over the ballast of what is artistically sought through a painted canvas, the density and three-dimensional presence of sculpture, or the moving materiality of video art.
1 Translation by Maria Helena da Rocha Pereira, in Hélade, ed. Faculdade de Letras de Coimbra, 1990, p. 98.
BIOGRAPHY
Ana Isabel Soares (b. 1970) has a PhD in Literary Theory (Lisbon, 2003), and has been teaching in the Algarve University (Faro, Portugal) since 1996. She was one of the founders of AIM – Portuguese Association of Moving Image Researchers. Her interests are in literature, visual arts, and cinema. She writes, translates, and publishes in Portuguese and international publications. She is a full member of CIAC – Research Centre for Arts and Communication.
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