Is there such a thing in nature as a perfect square?

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DATE

03 Aug 2026

AUTHOR

Umbigo

Is there such a thing in nature as a perfect square?

AUTHOR

Umbigo

“Observing Rodrigo Cass's work is, therefore, an exercise that invites us to suspend discourse. The experience happens before language, on a pre-verbal plane. Forms dissolve, colors expand, and images gain volume.”

When we contemplate a landscape, we rarely think about the geometries that compose it. Forms accompany us everywhere: in the Lisbon pavement, composed of cobblestones; in the leaves, in imperfect ovals; in the circular centers of weeds. Nature organizes itself through form, but this rarely imposes itself on our gaze. But what happens when form ceases to be a means and becomes the center of the work? What happens when color gives it body and core?

It is precisely in this territory that Rodrigo Cass's artistic practice develops. His research explores structures, cuts, and discontinuities on the pictorial plane, surpassing the limits of the two-dimensional surface by exploring three-dimensionality. However, geometry never emerges as a formal exercise. Spirituality constitutes an essential dimension of his artistic investigation, and it is through color, matter, and form that his work seeks to bring the visible closer to the invisible.

Before consolidating his career in the visual arts, Rodrigo Cass lived for several years in the Carmelite Order, an experience that profoundly marked his relationship with abstraction. In his work, abstraction does not represent an escape from reality, but an attempt to address that which escapes direct representation: mystery, the sacred. Geometry thus functions as a symbolic language capable of establishing a bridge between the sensible and the transcendent.

In the exhibition, a projected globe reflects an inverted Bible: sometimes it rests on a hand, sometimes it is picked up upside down, sometimes it falls without support, in an allegorical representation of the understanding, interpretation, and transmission of Christianity. Although the religious references are evident, it is primarily through the geometric organization of space and the chromatic intensity that Cass achieves a spiritual plane, inviting the observer to an experience that transcends religious narrative.

In the work A Floresta, o Pulmão e a Alma [The Forest, the Lung, and the Soul] (2026), the representation of the forest breaks through the pictorial surface. At the center of the composition, an angular structure rises from the plane, acquiring a three-dimensional presence that seems to expand organically. The painting ceases to be merely an image and becomes physical, establishing a constant tension between surface and volume, between matter and space. The forest ceases to represent only nature and asserts itself as a place of transformation and communication between the physical world and the sensible world.

In Cass's work, the line crosses the semicircle; the pink triangle asserts itself as the protagonist of the composition, contrasting with the white of the walls. Each form seems to take up the space with an almost ritualistic precision, as if geometry itself were a language of contemplation. The artist offers us a reinvented nature, where the observer ceases to be merely a spectator and becomes a participant in the experience. The spiritual does not impose itself; it reveals itself slowly, through contemplation.

I visited the exhibition for the second time with my friend Ángel Sevillano, a painter from Madrid visiting Lisbon. In front of the projection Físico [Physical] (2025), in which a burning match slowly consumes a fabric, our gazes diverged. Ángel sought to understand the creative process, mentally dismantling each technical decision that led to the installation. My gaze remained focused on what the work produced in the present: the sensory experience, the final image, the time of contemplation. The same work seemed to exist on two distinct planes—that of construction and that of perception.

It is common to enter an exhibition and remain oblivious to the artist's intention. When the artist speaks about their work, they usually seek to bring their practice closer to the public, translating into words what was born before language. The curator, in turn, offers an interpretation that, despite seeking a certain universality, inevitably remains a product of their own consciousness. Between the two lies the visitor's experience, which can hardly be fully guided.

Observing Rodrigo Cass's work is, therefore, an exercise that invites us to suspend discourse. The experience happens before language, on a pre-verbal plane. Forms dissolve, colors expand, and images gain volume. In Narciso no Mijo [Narcissus in Piss] (2026), the artist's reflection in a puddle is smoothed with an iron, in a daily and symbolic gesture that seeks to mask imperfection. However, matter – the subject – resists the attempt at annihilation, remaining, nevertheless, in continuous metamorphosis.

I remember Goethe. It is precisely in this metamorphosis that Cass's work approaches the thought of the German poet, for whom nature constitutes a continuous process of transformation (Bildung), in which each form is merely a transitory manifestation of the same vital principle. In Cass's work as well, geometry does not assert itself as an absolute structure nor as an ideal of perfection; rather, it reveals itself as a language capable of making visible the invisible forces that traverse matter. His forms do not contain definitive meanings, nor do they proclaim perfections. They remain open, like nature itself, in a continuous movement between the sensible and the spiritual, between what is seen and what is sensed.

The exhibition Sensitive Geometry, by Rodrigo Cass, is on display at Brotéria, in Lisbon, until August 29, 2026.

By Inês Folgôa Moreira

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