How to make birds cease their song
15.03.2025
17.05.2025

Even I already feel a World within
Opening its gates & in it all the real substances
Of which these in the outward World are shadows which pass away [1]

The temporal edge of Paulo Lisboa’s images is seldom elementary. Whether through doubt or formal strangeness, there is a permanent timelessness in his work (both in a historical understanding and in his own difficult plastic classification) that confuses an evident premeditation and distorts it. These returns can often be enhanced by the circularity present in some works or by the intuitive understanding of the indexicality that permeates the suggestion of the spiral, the halo, the centrifugal circulation and the tunnel that constantly reconfigure the contemplative potential they hold over their influence (optical and metaphysical). Faced with an haptic impermanence in terms of the matter, surface and nature of his images, the attempt, however fleeting, to capture an image that we can understand as final lies precisely in perceiving the limits of light and shadow.

Although in a hidden and vaguely obscure way, it is possible to sense in the group of works that permeate the exhibition the presence of a pictorial quality that was once more silent in the artist’s work. This means that a group of intelligible and visually analysable signs has been assimilated that are considerably more concrete and clear than in the past, which was itself deeply encrypted. Paradoxically, it is perhaps this uncertainty of a body or movement being veiled that complexifies its naming and consequent re- signification, like the figure of a vulture resting on a cemetery looking at the ground [2].

Presented almost like icons in an ecclesiastical logic, the seven images are organised following a hierarchical absence, in turn closer to a classical narrative that references both the moments before and after the presence of each individual object. Cloaks and rags of light are haunted by the crawling of any being or limb they cover, simultaneously accompanied by the scattering of bullets or fruits that evade like flies waiting to land on them. Resulting from a rigorous process of material degradation through a particular incidence of light, the physical composition of the black flannels is separated and reassembled, destroying the black colouring of the body that sustains them and resting the decay of the shadow once again in light. Although the complexity of the gradients (tonos and harmoge) and veils intimate to the images clearly belong to pictorial thinking and the dialectics of painting, this is only possible due to the pure destruction of matter, exerting a logic of subtraction on the composition of the works and bringing them closer to a sculptural thinking.

This slow burn, where chaos and fire seem to whisper their arrival, is simply offset, or we could say compensated, by the presence of a full and stable beam of light that is isolated at the back of the exhibition, stabilising both adjacent walls. Appearing as the exception in the exhibition, this image acts simultaneously as a pendulum and a flame, restoring to the group of works the certainty of the mirroring between its origin and its end. Just as Pliny recalls the story of the silencing of the birds song by introducing the image of a snake next to its nest, here too it is vision beyond sight that translates the surrounding omens into symbols and secrets fruit of blindness. There is no longer a plan.

Eva Mendes