landscapes change places… at the Fundação Eugénio de Almeida

article

DATE

01 Jul 2026

AUTHOR

José Pardal Pina

landscapes change places… at the Fundação Eugénio de Almeida

AUTHOR

José Pardal Pina

When we look at and see a landscape, we do so through the eyes of all those who have done so before us: painters, poets, writers, architects… they are the ones who have imbued the landscapes we now contemplate with mystery, psychological and sociological qualities, which become ever richer and more complex the more landscapes we interpret, admire, dream of and listen to. Therefore, the landscape is a cultural product; it shares in that process which Alain Roger termed “artialization,” when aesthetic feeling guides the perception and transformation of places.

Should one ask the landscape what its nature is, nothing more will be offered in reply than an image in the making – fleeting, yet unforgettable, and as much of the past as it is of the present. It is a mental image, a psychological, political and cultural construct, which tears us away from the concreteness of the real, everyday, vague world, and transports us to a forgotten childhood dream – once a substitute for nature, now a replicable photograph of a city. There can never be an objective, definitive visual definition, because within that image lie traces of a deep-seated time etched into stones, bones, and the elasticity or volatility of memory. It may also be a projection and a representation, not exactly discriminative, classifiable or fit into any category of modern indexing, because at times it is a fragrance, at others a line, a stain, an effect of the sun that has burnt the retina and left its mark, a distant, salty spritz from an entire ocean, or something that is all of these things, nothing more than that, thrust from all the cardinal points of memory and all of a sudden.

This comes in connection with the exhibition as landscapes change places: works from the PLMJ Foundation collection, curated by João Silvério and featuring 40 artists from various Portuguese-speaking countries, from a collection that offers a comprehensive exploration of the diverse meanings of the word “landscape”, ranging from the classical, representational conception of the term to dreamlike, abstract and gestural immersion.

There are several works that allude to the discreet yet intense state of grace that landscape occupies in contemporary painting. In the works of João Queiroz, Mariana Gomes, Ana Cardoso, Manuel Botelho, Pedro Vaz and Pedro Calapez, we sense what Anne Cauquelin once conceived of as landscape as invention or “illusion”. Here we find diffuse, evanescent images that only the paradoxical freedom of painting can capture through the flow of color and the expressiveness of the brushstroke: some are mental spaces, others, spaces of matter and experimentation; compositional, recombinable images, at times more drawing than painting; landscapes whose deceptive two-dimensionality compels us to delve into the many layers and overlays, and so on. Through these works, one recalls the old masters and the long pictorial tradition of landscape in the history of art – they who, as Cauquelin said, through painting, “created a kind of machine for looking at the landscape”. One cannot conceive of landscape without thinking of painting.

Nevertheless, this exhibition goes further, by becoming itself a landscape that emulates, simulates and sketches mentally composed images. Within this perspective, there are works which, rather than speaking about the landscape, exist instead as phenomena drawn from hidden places, whose presence helps to compose a shifting trail of metamorphic, strange things, fueled by the gaze that each viewer casts upon them: Margarida Lagarto’s flowers, Maia Escher’s signs, Virgínia Fróis’s reflecting pool and Jéssica Gaspar’s mesmerizing video depicting what appears to be a flaming ice ball. The exhibition creates space for reverie, for the wandering of bodies and gazes; it rehearses a choreography that disrupts the idea of linearity or, alternatively, that of fixity.

Regarding political, geographical, cultural and psychological contexts, there are many works worthy of mention, starting with that of Pedro Valdez Cardoso – a painstaking tangle of cartographic lines and seams, which redraws a map of borders in the form of a life jacket. It is a world adrift, seeking help, perhaps lost in the Mediterranean, or in some distant sea channel, which has turned borders into an object, an obstacle and a political subject – an end in itself, which condemns some to death whilst allowing only a few to pass – the wealthiest, always the wealthiest – in a balance that threatens to unravel, to break, to fragment.

Through Mónica de Miranda, the woman assumes a majestic pose, calmly observing the fabric of a city that appears in the distance, surrounded by an arid landscape—perhaps a peripheral, satellite city—which grows spontaneously and organically. De Miranda dignifies the black woman. The elevated perspective, in a composition centered on the female body, with the city as a backdrop, evokes romantic, contemplative and introspective painting, whilst simultaneously infusing the photographic – and almost cinematic – narrative with a whole range of intersectional and feminist contemporaneity. Through her lens, an entire decolonial process unfolds before the viewer.

João Grama’s photograph evokes Land Art and a rope cast out towards the cliffs and the churning sea, tracing a delicate embrace or outline across the rocks.

Fernanda Fragateiro presents us with the idea of an interior construction in perpetual flux, not only of the architectural space in which the work is installed, but also of that place—by now somber, by now luminous—which opens up with the viewer’s own reflection; the construction of a landscape is, after all, a more human than natural construction.

Again, in the realm of introspection, the work of Susana Mendes Silva: a continuous image of obsession, repeated and rewritten time and again, perhaps as a punishment, perhaps as a way of etching words and moments onto a surface deeper than paper, as a mnemonic, formative and informative gesture. The exhibition breaks free here from the obviousness of what is depicted – what is captured and reproduced by the senses – to venture into the ontology of landscape; that is, into what it means to be a landscape. In this sense, landscapes change place – this is what Georg Simmel alluded to when he spoke of landscape – a “spiritual process”, which requires “demarcation” because it is from this that the whole is expected to emerge in a fragment. This may be why Anne Cauquelin, too, insisted on the need for a “frame” – for it is the frame that “enables us to imagine what lies beyond it”, compelling the imagination to complete what it sees before it.

The exhibition's final room explores the potential interplay between the heritage character of the former Palace of the Inquisition – with its tiled panels and imposing architecture forming part of the curatorial composition – and the works of art. Horácio Frutuoso’s installation acts as a unifying element, creating a landscape of reflections, words and translucent planes that replicate and fragment the works surrounding it. In this room, the word is invoked to open up the landscape to the world. First through the echo of the inner voice, and then through the flash of light that illuminates the archaeology of memory. It is a realm of interiority, of intimate images, taboos and confessions, conceived within an ambiguous space of light, shadow and transparencies.

More than a limited text cannot be proposed here. Much remains in landscapes change places: Works from the PLMJ Foundation Collection that, for reasons of space, is left behind: the mountains and cartographies of Pedro Vaz, the intimate drawings of Juliana Matsumura (created using an engraving plate worn by time), Alice Geirinhas' constellation of drawings (which returns to the idea of narrative and sequence), the metamorphic nature of Cristina Ataíde’s sculpture on the terrace (benefiting from a logical dialogue with the building’s exterior), the mysterious photographs by Tito Mouraz, and so on. Nevertheless, this remains a possible chronicle of an inexhaustible exhibition, in which we will always find new places and shifting territories in everything the artists have crystallized in a fleeting moment or a single image.

The famous metaphor of the palimpsest also applies here: each gaze always adds another, new experience of the landscape, renewing meanings and pointing towards paths not yet explored in an idealized and romanticized Nature, in a modern city, on a map of affections, or in landscapes composed of many others – some conflicting, but always fertile ground for art. Landscapes are inexhaustible: they are phenomena of the spirit that take shape through composite matter – “transgenic”, according to Álvaro Domingues – always and necessarily incorporating what technology, politics, capital, agribusiness and speculation, in the broadest sense, bring to the construction of an imagistic plane.

landscapes change place: works from the PLMJ Foundation collection is on display at the Eugénio de Almeida Foundation in Évora until 30 August, and features works by Alice Geirinhas, Ana Cardoso, Ana Pérez-Quiroga, António Júlio Duarte, Catarina Leitão, Cristina Ataíde, Daniel V. Melim, Délio Jasse, Fernanda Fragateiro, Francisco Vidal, Horácio Frutuoso, Jéssica Gaspar, João Cutileiro, João Fonte Santa, João Grama, João Pedro Vale + Nuno Alexandre Ferreira, João Queiroz, José Chambel, José Pedro Croft, Juliana Matsumura, Maja Escher, Manuel Botelho, Margarida Lagarto, Mariana Gomes, Miguel Ângelo Rocha, Moira Forjaz, Mónica de Miranda, Nuno Nunes-Ferreira, Pedro Calapez, Pedro Valdez Cardoso, Pedro Vaz, Ramiro Guerreiro, René Tavares, Rosana Ricalde, Rui Soares Costa, Susana Gaudêncio, Susana Mendes Silva, Tito Mouraz, Vasco Araújo, Virgínia Fróis, Vítor Ribeiro. Curated by João Silvério.

BIOGRAPHY

José Pardal Pina has been the associate editor of Umbigo since 2018. He has an Integrated Master's in Architecture from Instituto Superior Técnico, Universidade de Lisboa, and a Post-Graduation in Curatorship from Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas, Universidade Nova de Lisboa. Curator of the Dialogues (2018-2024) and Landscapes (2025-) projects in Umbigo.

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