Fac-símile, Rita Ferreira’s new exhibition, held at Galeria 3+1 Arte Contemporânea and open until January 6, previews itself on the introductory text, containing only the works’ titles and the artist’s curriculum vitae. The intention is to establish the idea of works without further discourse, not conceptual but experimental.

The works have three underlying historical pillars: colour independence, which started its journey in modernism, especially Fauvism, and continued later in the post-World War II colour field; the idea of iron industrialisation, shaping it in new ways; and pop art, where the repetition and standardisation of contemporary objects is addressed for the first time. Fac-símile embraces all these chronological spans and its works are conversations between them.

The phenomenon of pure colour, stripped down to its form, engrosses us. A world of vague shapes in heavy, but not harsh colours, softened by light oil paint and the material on which they are laid. They are the business card. The organic shapes (rings, lines, animal shapes, circumferences) are grounded in blues, browns, purples, beiges, yellows, piece by piece. The non-figurative prevails.

As far as materials are concerned, contemporary art has made us familiar with raising questions about the artistic object’s support. Rita Ferreira is also changing her previous experiences with canvas and contrasting the white wall with painted metal, while maintaining a sense of continuity in her lines and gestures – the same ones that led her to the 2022 Fundação EDP New Artists Award exhibition.

The metal stairs dividing the exhibition’s two floors, meanwhile, echo the noise of the exhibited image, tapping into the textures of the works. In cinematic imagination, junkyards are freedom spots. Places where objects no longer useful are scattered, but often locations where people partake in the potential for destruction as liberation. An escape. The material used by the artist reminds us of this flattened iron, coated in monochrome tones.

The support is cross-sectional, reminding us that the canvas is the object we return to again and again when we dive into painting. But this repetition is not Warholian, it is not actually a facsimile, it changes upon execution, sometimes with traces of some unspecified fauna or flora. If reality mimesis is the hallmark of figurative art, the repeating materials in abstract works invites comparison and establishes a rhythm.

At the exit, we can take a manual edition of the discourse and work The Splash of a Drop by Arthur Mason Worthington. In this piece, the art-making process moves from discourse to laboratory experimentation; from real elements and phenomena from physics, experimenting with the dropping of different liquids (water, mercury, milk) onto different surfaces. Apart from the historical reference to the technique of speed photography, which is used here as a tool to achieve scientific findings, preceding a technique that will become fundamental to artistic work, the specificity of the theory of fluid mechanics is maintained in the reissue’s reproduction. The viewers are then able to pocket the exhibition’s synthesis as they leave.