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Against the explanation’s rush: Só me saem duques e cenas tristes at Vila Flor Palace, in Guimarães
“Perhaps it is this insistence that unites the three artists. The curatorial text speaks of algorithms; works return to the body. It speaks of probabilities; they insist on matter. It speaks of systems; they return gestures to us.”
Contemporary art has its favorite buzzwords. Used to the point of wear and tear. “Freedom” is one of them. “Chance” is another. They appear in curatorial writings, exhibition catalogs, and hallway conversations with an almost devotional fidelity, as if simply uttering them were enough to restore the meaning they have since lost. Perhaps because both hold a promise that the present has made difficult to fulfill—the increasingly improbable possibility that not everything has already been predetermined.
Só me saem duques e cenas tristes1 stems precisely from that vocabulary. The exhibition notes speak of algorithms, probabilities, and invisible systems; of the need to reclaim an idea of freedom. It’s a curious formulation. “Reclaiming” presupposes that we know where we lost what we’re looking for. I’m not sure that’s the case. I don’t know if freedom has disappeared. Perhaps it has simply shifted to a different place. In fact, there is a certain eagerness to explain things in contemporary art. Images, gestures, materials, and relationships are explained. The archive, the body, and memory are explained. So much is explained that, at times, interpretation seems to precede the experience itself. It is no surprise that words like “algorithm” or “system” have claimed a privileged place in the curatorial vocabulary. They allow us to describe the present with an almost comforting efficiency. Fortunately, this exhibition’s works seem to be wary of that comfort. They don’t reject the idea of a system. They merely reject the notion that the system is sufficient. There is a difference.
Hugo Flores works with heavy materials: iron, bronze, metal. But the sensation that lingers is not one of weight; it is one of slowness. A small sculpture almost disappears against a wall that is far too vast. It does not compete with the space; it discreetly alters the way we inhabit it. In a video, two hands remain submerged in water. We wait for a decisive gesture, a transformation—anything that might justify the picture’s duration. It doesn’t happen. For a few seconds, we find ourselves doing what we so rarely do when faced with art: waiting. And waiting has become a strange experience.
The curatorial design recognizes this. It does not attempt to turn the exhibition into an illustration of the curatorial narrative. There is space between the works, between the walls, between the gestures. In an exhibition landscape where intensity is so often confused with accumulation, this exhibition understands the value of the pause. It forces us to slow down—not because it imposes a contemplative path, but because it recognizes that some works simply cease to exist when viewed too hastily.
Teresa Arêde, too, seems interested in that moment just before recognition. Her background in opera makes it inevitable to think of the vocal cords as the place where language has not yet taken shape. Before words, there is only air. Muscle. Vibration. Body. The forms made of silicone and fabric refuse to settle into a single image. They are lungs. Tears. Organs. A landscape. For far too long, art critics believed that understanding a work meant being able to define it. Teresa Arêde asks a different question. What happens when we stop immediately searching for a name? The answer never comes—and thank goodness for that.
Luísa Abreu’s images introduce yet another hesitation. The body returns continually, but now mediated by the screen. Faces magnified until they lose their human scale. Colors that seem too vivid to be natural. Gestures whose function remains suspended. The video constantly reminds us we are looking at a constructed image. And yet, there is something that insists on remaining physical: the skin, the breath, the duration of a gaze.
Perhaps it is this insistence that unites the three artists. The curatorial text speaks of algorithms; works return to the body. It speaks of probabilities; they insist on matter. It speaks of systems; they return gestures to us. It is not an opposition. It is a correction. John Berger once wrote that we never look at just one thing; we always look at the relationship between things and ourselves. Perhaps that is where the exhibition becomes even more interesting. Not a reflection on chance as a concept, but on the way we continue to seek out small pockets of indeterminacy in a world that seems to want to anticipate everything. It is no coincidence that the exhibition’s most powerful works resist an immediate interpretation. Not because they are obscure, but because they reject the speed with which we nowadays confuse understanding with identification. And, in the end, perhaps chance is just the usual suspect. Chance, poor thing, has been used for almost everything: to speak of freedom, error, systems, destiny; a small word into which contemporary art has a habit of stuffing everything it prefers not to define. It is generous, accessible, abstract enough to seem profound, and flexible enough to never have to fully account for itself. But what the exhibition leaves behind is something else—less presentable and harder to shape: images that refuse to be contained, gestures that elude explanation. The works do not solve the problem. That is not their purpose. And that is one of their qualities. They linger. They persist. They take their time. In an age when everything seems compelled to justify itself before it even exists, this lingering may be their most precise form of resistance.
And for those who still want to spend some time with things that cannot be resolved quickly, the exhibition is on display at the Vila Flor Palace in Guimarães until August 1. Curated by Ivo Martins.
1 The expression Só me saem duques e cenas tristes is a colloquial and idiomatic phrase associated with card games, used to describe bad luck or frustration. The phrase means that, despite hoping for or needing higher-value cards, the player keeps drawing lower-value face cards (such as duques) or receiving bad news.
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