Pó de Estrelas by Catarina Osório de Castro, at Dialogue Gallery

article

DATE

04 Nov 2025

AUTHOR

João Pedro Soares

Pó de Estrelas by Catarina Osório de Castro, at Dialogue Gallery

AUTHOR

João Pedro Soares

Catarina Osório de Castro presents her sixth solo exhibition, this time at Dialogue Gallery in Marvila. The Lisbon-based photographer condenses a poetic and mysterious visuality into a set of twenty photographs, centred around an axial idea, expressed by the artist herself in a poem that opens the exhibition catalogue: Somos pele, somos carne/ Somos mar/ Somos pó estelar (We are skin, we are flesh/ We are sea/ We are stardust).

It is for this reason that the exhibition Pó de Estrelas immediately seems to envelop the viewer's gaze in a primordial, genealogical and embryonic contemplation, dominated by a visual investigation of the surface of things, or, in other words, the skin of the world. Among photographs of tree foetuses, details of rocks and cacti with spines so fine they look like wool; among secret streams of yellow ochre, fleeting portraits of shimmering skins, we always find ourselves faced with textures and layers that retain an idea of a trace, a mark, clues to cosmological creation. It seems that all things shine at the same time.

This effect is achieved through unusual framing, where the composition breaks or cuts unexpectedly. Tight angles present the textures of the world through Osório de Castro's authorial point of view: the green vegetative symmetries of the foliage, the small droplets on the surface of the sea, like a golden mantle. Granular crumbs lie on the rocks, and sparkling glints, cosmic dust, settle on the photographed faces. Blurring is used carefully in some portraits, alluding precisely to this plastic layer of the photographic surface, to the grain felt by the analogue, to the traces of light, allowing small signs and rhymes to be glimpsed in this search for sidereal dust.

Plants and bodies are observed as well as plastic and greenhouses. Perhaps in an allusion to the dichotomies of a world already bewildered by such rapid change, where the vegetable, mineral and human are chosen for their ability to dazzle and capture contemplation, immediately countered by the coldness of synthetic compounds, the inorganic fibres that surround plant nurseries, the same fibres that make up the clothes of the bodies inside the greenhouses. Somos feitos de estrelas/Somos feitos de pó (We are made of stars/We are made of dust), Catarina Osório de Castro tells us, but are our technological creations also made of these same materials? Will they too one day become dust? Existential ephemerality cannot withstand the impetus of human constructions and technocracies, and perhaps that is why, in the last room of the gallery, in front of the photographs of the greenhouses, the bodies have no faces; they are ghostly appeals for a different world, made of commendable degrowth, where the planet can thrive.

In one of the photographs, we see a woman sitting at night, seemingly by a bonfire, and if before we observed the surface, the microscopic clues to the creation of life, now the invitation extends to inner contemplation, in an apology for initiatory, meditative darkness, which opens the halo to new glimpses of a starry sky.

The exhibition is on display at the Dialogue Gallery until 22 November and admission is free.

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