Just Believe. is a symmetrical exhibition. In Uma Lulik gallery’s square space, there are 12 works by 4 artists, 3 for each. According to the exhibition text, “coincidences or points of contact between them may be circumstantial”. It is an honest show, without any major pretensions apart from showing the work of four young artists: Elisa Azevedo, Fábio Colaço, Isabel Cordovil and Pedro Henriques.

Among the possibilities of unifying themes, the most tangible will be intimacy, something even suggested by the gallery’s small size. First, our gaze will find a set of three works triangularly positioned: There won’t be any miracles for us by Isabel Cordovil, Untitled (debt) by Fábio Colaço and Sem Título (Body to Body) by Elisa Azevedo. The three works seem to announce an absence, the wait for a revelation that never happens. In the first, we see a photograph of two negative pregnancy tests; in the second, an open white hand, with a hole in the palm, waiting for its will to come true; in the last, the shadow of a silhouette on fabric, evading the frame. The secret they hide has something ironic about it: although cryptic and suggestive, the stance is direct, confrontational, eliciting humour in the unpredictability.

Of the three works mentioned, Elisa Azevedo’s seems the one most likely to elude this dynamic. Its suggestive and symbolic atmosphere overlaps with the minimal resourcefulness of the other works by Isabel Cordovil, with idealisations and disillusions, extemporaneous proximities combined in visions that capture so as not to let them escape – both prompt almost private, confiding representations. The exhibited works of these two artists seem to belong to the same universe, constantly playing with secretive, prohibitive and emancipating dynamics. For example, Natalia on a Sunday morning at age 21, lying in a bathtub, looking at us, could be the same person as the silhouette in Sem Título (Body to Body). The photography in There won’t be any miracles for us also has the same focus, the same will to apprehend in the white and total grasp of the object, as Elisa’s Flesh Flowers. These suggest a sexual and intimate atmosphere in 2 photographs: on one side, sheets dug into a flower; on the other, the black, dangling laces of a fetish piece. These laces further make a connection to the work next to it, the delicately ironic Two Helmets in the position of Rodin’s Le Baiser. Here, through a reference to a sculpture that precedes it by almost two centuries, two helmets are positioned that capture the void – this shows what we don’t see but know: a kiss.

This absurd feeling is a nice transition point to the works by Pedro Henriques and Fábio Colaço. In the lyricism of the 3 works, there are dense structures, composed of inferred layers and incubating processes. Pedro Henriques adds buttons to them (functionally speaking, as if they were switches). In Cara Longa, perhaps the most immediately digestible of these artworks, we see the dark palm of a hand, sombre, gloomy. Its atmosphere is negated by the disposition of arcade buttons, seemingly denouncing an impossible functionality. We tentatively go to the semantic meaning of that switch, an object that suspends the flow of an electric current. In the abstract, watery silhouettes of Fonte and Elefante, this dynamic becomes even more evident, triggering further contradictory meanings. Be it the relation of the form with the title, the texture or its alleged functionality. These works are well aware of the impossibility of their captivity.

In Fábio Colaço, besides the first hand already mentioned, we have another in the opposite corner of this square, showing the shape of O or 0, nothing. Its humour is cynical, it exists in the nonsense of its hyper-reality, used in a minimal and unexpected intention that becomes ironic. His latest work lies at the gallery’s centre, the up to date Just Believe, a white painting with these two words, arranged like a caption from a meme. This, by saying nothing (or everything?), makes anything possible. We just have to believe. While this one, through the ambiguity and openness of its relationships, embodies the exhibition’s unpretentiousness, it also made me think. The exhibition wants us to see the image of a young, future generation, able to live between incongruous barriers to define its originality, to unite ambiguous relationships, intimacy and irony – opposite poles, but essential in a life submerged in digital dimensions. This Just Believe by Fábio Colaço stirs another union of these apparent opposites, the transformation of the meme into painting. But what kind of transformation is this? An ironic dissociation, which overturns contexts? Or a statement of the art world’s imprisonment of the figure of the artist, incapable of welcoming and keeping up with this every day, accessible, effectively democratic expression that is the meme, probably due to its still unknown ability for physical commercialisation?

There are initial questions that remain unanswered, needed when we talk about the future of art, such as here in which, be that as it may, we have seen an honest and competent exhibition: it did not deliver more than it promised. A minimal gesture.

Just Believe. is at Uma Lulik gallery until April 30.