In the early hours of the morning, I’m writing this brief article about the beautiful Amor I Love You exhibition, and over the last couple of hours I still haven’t managed to do it justice. Maybe due to the academic cliché of my situation – added to which I was a student of Margarida Brito Alves, who curated the exhibition together with Giullia Lamoni -, I decided to take a different approach to try and understand the source of my predicament.

An exhibition – when done properly – should become a place where the collective (public) individually reinvents concepts. In other words, the “meaning” of the exhibition should be formed by each viewer’s numerous interpretations. A singular sharing experience. Art itself is fuelled by its own vagueness to call into question the certainties of those who look at it, ultimately dealing with the constant reformulation of itself. It is hardly surprising, then, that almost everyone throughout history who has dubbed themselves an artist or poet has reflected on the never static concept of love in some way.

The difference in this exhibition – and as in any group exhibition – is that whoever sets the stage is not an artist, but an entity that should have no authorial ambitions, but rather must ensure that each work chosen engages in a dialogue with the others so as to bring out certain qualities in it that only stand out as a whole. This entity is called a curator.

In their brilliant way, Margarida Brito Alves and Giullia Lamoni provide us with no more than a clue as to how to “build this puzzle” without limited pieces, infinite and incomplete. “They say to the walls” that it’s a matter of the heart. And the works by Belén Uriel, Carla Cabanas, Daniela Krtsch, Daniel Arthur, Dayana Lucas, Inês Brites, Joana Ramalho, João Gabriel, Mané Pacheco, Mariana Viegas, Maura Grimaldi, Nádia Duvall and Sara Bichão provide not one, but infinite answers to infinite interpretations of what love and art should be.

This is not an exhibition on romantic or affective love, sex or sexuality, fortitude or fragility. Rather, it’s about the many different expressions that the notion of love can take on, and what love means, not in art, but in life (isn’t that the same thing?), applied to each person’s reality.

That being said, why do I find it so difficult to write about this exhibition? Because I would certainly have a personal interpretation, which would be no more than an exercise in projection, and I would find my preferences in certain pieces that could lead me to a descriptive exercise. But the point here is the whole, the sharing, not only of what the works offer individually to the others, but also of the personal experience of each viewer when they see them as a part of the larger group represented by the audience. I challenge the readers to put themselves in a peculiar situation and go to a psychiatric hospital in search of love.

The exhibition Amor I Love You, curated by Margarida Brito Alves and Giullia Lamoni, is on display at Pavilhão 31 in Lisbon’s Júlio de Matos Hospital until June 8, 2023. There will also be a publication by the end of the same month.