We enter the body of Rui Matos’ exhibition A Sequência dos Dias and are suddenly struck by vibrant forms in black tones. Linear some, corporeal others, the slender forms entwine on the walls, sneak around the corners, and twist and turn throughout the gallery space.

They both cling to the high, white walls of the gallery and wind through the space, in a play of oppositions between concave and convex, full and empty, curved and straight.

The horizontal lines, drawn on the wall, or sculpted in the air, sustain long narratives. As in a score, small sculptural elements follow one another and punctuate the space in different directions. Their axes rival each other, and not a single element repeats itself, even if it is morphologically close to what precedes or succeeds it, or is closer to it.

Truncated cones, cylinders arranged in a skewed manner, waving halves of circles, which look more like tongues, emerge from metallic structures, autonomously, and in different positions.

In the objects that merge, on the tables, we can see forms that allude to a certain geometry, others that appeal to the organic. On the long, large table, there are geometric elements, and other forms that seem to suggest animal horns. There are also holes in the base that cause the formation, on the ground, of small random circles of light.

Throughout the exhibition there is a frequent play of shadows caused by the metal structures that, sinuous, support these artefacts. Ballets of lines cover the wall and give the forms greater prominence.

On the other hand, they allude to mysterious architectural spaces, which inhabit our most recondite memory.

There are small entrances, or “excavations”, that lead the gaze to the interior of matter and, consequently, to the binomial light/shadow. These tunnels will then open in another part of the piece, where we least expect it.

Rui Matos’ structures are not made to be predictable.

The way in which they challenge the observer and surprise him is what most defines the artist and his greatest coherence.

In the gallery there are objects that, by their position in space, and by the idea of rhythm, almost suggest an intertextuality. But it is not possible to forget what is unique in matter and what cannot be translated into words. It is on matter that we can focus our attention. As Filomena Molder would say, it is as if we were dealing only with what is concrete in matter, let us say, matter that contains its own way of communicating and that cannot be described in words.

And throughout the exhibition there are so many moments in which matter dictates so many things that cannot be transformed into a verb.

And so, the lines emerge, sometimes through shadows, sometimes through lights, sometimes through pieces that evolve in space and remind us of modernist furniture, is it a bookcase? And the other one further on, a table?

Are shelves and tables intended to prefigure symbolic exchanges? Or rather semantic games that spring from the life and daily life of men?

The games of light and shadow perpetuate themselves in space. Shadows of their own and projected shadows. In fact, in the exhibition, they are truly the protagonists.

The allusion to the transversality of disciplines is also clearly visible. There is a whole scenographic game, both in the human-scale structures and in the small coloured models that are fixed to the wall. And that remind us of an older project by Nuno Matos Thinking another scale. In them we can build plots and imagine narratives. See characters on a small scale, moving and gesticulating, giving body to a drama or an unsolvable story. The colour palettes of the sculptures also leave us ambivalent about whether they are paintings or three-dimensional objects. Were we not once avid readers of Clement Greenberg, we would be confused and left with few tools to unravel the mystery.

There is even a group of pieces hanging on the walls that vary according to the colours applied.

We are, therefore, stimulated to move from the imaginary of pure drawing to the architectural imaginary, from the architectural to the sculptural, from the sculptural to the scenographic, from the scenographic to the pictorial, from the pictorial to the architectural/sculptural, and so on, and in an absolutely agile way, and without any constraint.

It was Tinguely, the artist of Métamatics sculptures, who said: “Il n’y a pas d’immobilite. (…) Cessez toute resistance au changement”. Rui Matos’ painted surfaces, or the pieces Configurations and Tell me stories, among others, evoke precisely this interdisciplinary fluidity.

The artist’s most recent works also seem to evoke music, and Stockhausen’s disciple, the 20th century composer Cornellius Cardew, and his work Treatise (1961), with its impressive graphic scores. Cornellius called for improvisation and a sense of freedom in the interpretation of his work. We can also evoke Ponty, who, one day, illustrating this thought, said: “absolute objectivity is a mere dream”.

A Sequência dos Dias by Rui Matos is on show at the Sociedade Nacional de Belas Artes until 15 October.