One thing spawns an encounter when it crosses another. In this encounter, the eye is filled with light and the images grow fed by the sun. But the chances for this encounter are not limited to a fixed point. Or a star. Some people prefer to interpret the encounter through a right angle. A point unfolded into two lines. In a glass painting, the opacity of matter surrenders to translucence. In it, the shapes displayed do not act alone in the space reserved for painting. The forms, figures and colours are permeated by elements external to the means used in the painting itself.

Through NO·NO Gallery‘s glazed façade, our eyes encounter the suspended paintings of Mariana Caló and Francisco Queimadela, seven paintings on glass, a part of what they present in Dobra Sol, an exhibition that opened on April 7.

Inside the gallery, the suspended paintings (Dobra Sol, 2022) call to their doubles – they are alive – like the flow that inspires the air that crosses animal and plant species. The sun unfolds into thousands of bodies that nourish themselves as it passes by and, as they are crossed by the sunlight, the paintings by Mariana Caló and Francisco Queimadela also unfold and reproduce themselves on the gallery walls.

As with living beings, light is a creative source.

To see the paintings unfold in the gallery, one must be in the fold of time, at the exact moment when the sun digs cracks in the sky, folding itself into the landscape as an encounter. An encounter made with the glow of shifting forms projected onto the wall. We speak of movement-paintings that, due to the porosity of matter, expand floating through space, denying a definite point, embracing the discontinuous, the fleeting. Not everything that passes through remains.

However, we might think that the potential of these paintings does not just linger on the side of light. The doubles of colour and movement that paint the NO·NO Gallery walls make shadow a place of affirmation. It is through this illumination – of that which possesses nobody – that we say the paintings reveal themselves – they become body from this dialectical relationship that (re)activates or unfolds them.

Light also gives rise to its opposite. In the darkness, we can see Palomacia (2022). In the video on the gallery’s lower floor, the notion of fold is suggested as a hypothesis to consider relations between communities and species, beyond human potentialities, as advocated by the philosopher Michael Marder, whose voice is heard at the speed of the images.

The wings that infinitely repeat a movement – folding and unfolding – are shown in Palomacia. In the video, we find images of two white doves, multiplied into several, something that echoes the sun’s reproductive movement.

The birds, as we can hear in Marder’s words, are vehicles of transport -seeds, spores, or pollen-, a vital gesture to sustain life on the planet, where the welcoming of raw materials is temporary. The welcoming – folding – gives way to the opposite and the seeds and vital materials migrate to other species and surfaces – unfolding -, like light. This movement implied in folding also encompasses plants. By folding and unfolding themselves, plants participate in the encounter with the vital flux that circulates among the different types of living beings. The foundation of the fold: “unfolding into other forms of existence”, something that seems to refer to Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari and geophilosophy. Like Michael Marder’s words, the focus is not on the fixed or territorial^[1], but on that which moves – transit – where the porosity implied in crossing is pivotal.

Human hands are also in Palomacia. Hands can be our wings, which are also a vehicle. Hands that fold and unfold a whole life. Like the wings of birds. Or like the heart.

“Yesterday it was hand and bird morning

ambushed in the canopy and now what

remains of the act is still the act here the bird’s act”^[2]

Dobra Sol is at NO·NO Gallery until May 28, 2022.

“(…) we have already seen that the earth does not cease to perform a movement of deterritorialisation in the same place through which it exceeds any territory: it is deterritorialising and deterritorialised. It is itself intermingled with the movement of those who abandon their territory en masse, lobsters queuing up at the bottom of the water, pilgrims or riders who ride a celestial fleeing line. The earth is not one element among the others, it gathers all the elements in the same embrace, but uses one or the other to deterritorialise the territory.”. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, O que é a filosofia?, Translated by Margarida Barahona and António Guerreiro, Editorial Presença: Lisbon, 1992, p. 77

^[2] Excerpt from poem no. 6, in, António Ramos Rosa, O Incêndio dos Aspectos, A Regra do Jogo: Lisbon, 1980, p. 20