Through the quiet alleys of a night-time and wintry Ericeira, the windows of Hélder Alfaiate – Galeria de Arte are bursting with Pedro Henriques and José Loureiro’s colours. PUNCTUM VISUS, the latest entry in the Tête-À-Tête cycle, is the seventh of this exhibition series that started in 2022, curated and organised by Frederico Portas and Tomás Agostinho, aiming to propose an anachronistic dialogue between an emerging artist and a veteran artist. The conversation is started by the younger participant, who chooses an established peer and to whom a question or an answer is suggested. These are sometimes pieces commissioned specifically for this novel interaction and, in other cases – such as this exhibition -, new creations encounter echoes of another life, refreshed by the interpretative possibilities that emerge from that fleeting relationship.

This indicates the path to follow when thinking about this encounter between Pedro Henriques and José Loureiro. Firstly, we need to acknowledge – as the curatorial text does – the echoes that naturally emerge from both artistic corpuses when set side by side, face to face. Then, it is worth identifying the subtleties that the work of one can reveal about the work of the other, revealing the details that unite and separate them in not-so-obvious ways. While writing this brief essay, I’m reminded of another creative dialogue I tuned in to nearly exactly a year ago, between David Correia Gonçalves and Paulo Brighenti, at Brotéria. I remember how challenging, yet especially pleasurable, the exercise of finding common radicals between different languages is – like that epiphany when one finds, for instance, a word in Portuguese that has the same ring to it in English. Back then, I translated the same singular attention to the time layered in each material and the interspecies coexistence that built up in reflection processes and work production. Now – as in every relationship and exchange, which are never repeated – I have found out that the matters in this unexpected duo are of an absolutely different nature.

Firstly, if we adopt a more general viewpoint – one that is perhaps distant and overhead, since PUNCTUM VISUS unfolds precisely on the problem of the sited gaze – an approximation immediately becomes possible: even with little more than two decades of difference, both Pedro Henriques, winner of the 2014 Novo Banco Revelation Prize, and José Loureiro, currently presenting his first major solo show in France, have a surprisingly cohesive career. The aesthetic precision of both artists’ approach is such that their visual codes are like an alphabet, a closed and dictionary-like grammar. The signs are so stable and the meanings so accurate that only in this way – as in a language driven mad by poetry – can they also be broken, distorted. This is why we readily recognise Pedro Henriques’ faux reliefs or artificial colours and patterns, or José Loureiro’s poignant brushstrokes and self-contained forms, without them seeming like used-up resources. Quite the opposite, each new series heralds a small-big curve, a misplaced word, an unusual neologism that de-centres that familiar language.

The language analogy is no coincidence. Henriques and Loureiro formulate an eloquent discourse with clarity and meticulousness in every choice they make in their creative processes – I have witnessed this myself. Yet this elaboration is not usually or easily associated with their works. To quote Loureiro in a past interview, “[t]he colours communicate with each other using an indecipherable code that is impervious to even the most powerful algorithm. They are as slippery as an eel and as prickly as a pear. We shall never discover a Rosetta Stone[1] for colours”. When we talk about this sliding language, we are also speaking of a game of attractions and repulsions, visibilities and invisibilities; simply put, attempts to invent or displace signifiers until their specific forms, positions and relationships produce original meanings. In PUNCTUM VISUS, this movement towards abstraction is clearly only possible, like any well-made metaphor, because it rests on top of very concrete motifs and elements.

As we look closer at each piece, we can identify different layers of reality (even those that are themselves somewhat abstract). José Loureiro unearths microscopic creatures in his pictorial study, here condensed in Ácaros (2018). These are figures whose reality is always concealed, perhaps a bit like their intense features and broad gestures – which, although more or less present in the world, can only truly emerge through art’s perspective and choreography. For example, in the two works in Pedro Henriques’ Color cave series, the artist’s spontaneous drawings on paper become a kind of digital map for his hybrid compositions. As they coexist with other textures forged later on the wooden canvas, his diffuse chromatic territories – riddled with transparency and impossible-to-reproduce gradients in paint – are given strength in the non-randomness on which they are supported. The buttons that he finally attaches to each layout – and which in fact seem perfectly localised, as if they had always been there – add a final layer to this heap of operations and point to the Punctum of the work: this time, Barthes’ Punctum, that active component, belonging to the order of unintelligible manifestation, penetrating, piercing, puncturing. It calls us to touch. The final point of his text.

PUNCTUM VISUS :: Pedro Henriques x José Loureiro is at Hélder Alfaiate – Galeria de Arte until April, 28 2024.

[1] The Rosetta Stone is a fragment of a granodiorite stele carved in Ptolemaic Egypt, whose text was key to the modern understanding of Egyptian hieroglyphics.